Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything (27 page)

EXTREME LONG-TERM PRESERVATION

I was asked to give the keynote address at the British Library’s Digital Lives Conference while writing this book. There was a fascinating discussion about how the library of the future will preserve e-memories rather than papers. But looming behind all the technical details is the really big question: Who gets in the British Library’s digital lifeboat and who gets left behind? However incredible the growth of storage continues to be, the library’s storage will remain finite, and after all, they aren’t interested in keeping the e-memories of everyone. They will continue to save only those of the most eminent politicians, authors, philosophers, and so on. And it is not clear to what “depth” they will be kept—is it better to have ten full lives or twenty lives at half-resolution?

This raises a question closer to home: Will my progeny one thousand years hence really be able to have a copy of all their ancestors’ lives? As I pointed out, each person could have millions of ancestors in that time span, so each individual’s having a full family tree of e-memories is out of the question. The cost of storage would have to be shared among all members of the family. We might even think of the cost being shared among the entire human family; each generation could share the cost of trying to preserve all previous generations.

The capacity of hard drives and other storage devices is growing. So, too, are the number of them being sold. In 1995, 89 million hard drives were sold. In 2008 more than 480 million were sold. Still, we cannot presume that the amount of storage each person can afford will endlessly grow, even at a modest rate. If population growth were fast enough, one could imagine each successive generation being able to carry forward the past. However, we may see negative population growth, as in some Western countries, and additional population growth in conditions of poverty will not support the retention of e-memories.

How to keep our ancestral memories after the end of exponential storage growth is an open problem. It may even be impossible. So, though it goes against my grain to say so, it may turn out that most lives need to have their storage cost reduced over time. Video, which takes the most space by far, stands to be trimmed down the most. This could mean deleting repetitious or boring parts, or it could mean reducing the resolution, for example converting high-definition video to YouTube quality. However, I am in realms beyond my ten-year time frame. Thousand-year preservation is a matter shrouded in uncertainty.

THE WISDOM OF SPORTSCASTERS

The San Jose Sharks hockey team has just scored to tie the game with less than a minute remaining.

“And what a great pass by Thornton!” proclaims play-by-play announcer Randy Hahn. “Looks like we are going to overtime, folks!”

In the postgame show, Randy notes that Joe Thornton has assisted in more goals than any other player in the National Hockey League, and that this is the ninth time this season that he has helped tie a game up that seemed lost. He narrates over a video clip of tonight’s goal, and also another one from a similar game a few weeks past. He can recite the team’s record with and without Thornton. He has a “telestrator” that electronically diagrams the position of Thornton each time he made one of his legendary passes.

Sportscasters like Randy Hahn give us a real foretaste of Total Recall, with endless statistics at their fingertips, and the ability to replay game clips or interviews. Sportscasters for auto racing possess an added insight into a life filled with sensors, which record such values for each car as track position, rpm, and speed, while logging track conditions such as temperature, humidity, air pressure, rainfall, and wind speed. They use their Total Recall to entertain and inform us. Their hard data confirms or debunks our sporting theories. With Total Recall, they develop deep insight into their sport.

Diarists also have a foretaste of Total Recall. Whether done for posterity, for better memory, or simply for catharsis, journaling has many practitioners. Mark Stewart, a software engineer from Great Britain, was inspired by reading about MyLifeBits to create what he calls MyLifeDisk. It is a hyperlinked, two-volume DVD chronicle of his life, including words, spreadsheets, photos, videos, and songs. You can explore his family tree, where he has lived, his memorabilia, his education, his career, and a complete accounting of his girlfriends. Mark’s life-disk really illustrates where life stories are headed, and is so compelling that he was invited to present it to the British Library at the Digital Lives conference that I keynoted. A digital life is clearly a step forward in passing on one’s story to posterity.

It isn’t just about who was president or what wars were fought or even the troubles of your neighbors. It is about the substance of your autobiographical memories, from your environment to your myriad relationships. It is about your memories and how you remembered them. E-memories reveal the meaning of your life.

Of course, I’ve had my own foretaste of Total Recall with MyLifeBits. From the beginning, MyLifeBits was conceived as a project to understand the feasibility, cost, and value of storing everything in your life. It has largely served that purpose. Like Cathal Gurrin, who wouldn’t give up his SenseCam, I’m not ready to give up any of my lifelogging. I know just how much it is worth. I’m ready now to put my money where my mouth is and invest in start-ups that will take advantage of the e-memory revolution.

Total Recall will improve our lives and afterlives in many ways. It will shake our societies and change our cultures. We look back at the ages before the advent of writing as “prehistory.” The next generation will look back on our era as pre-Total Recall.

ANNOTATED REFERENCES AND RESOURCES

This section is for people familiar with computer technology, or any reader with enough curiosity to dig deeper into the ideas behind Total Recall. Those eager to get started with Total Recall will find some useful pointers as well. In addition to citations for material in the book chapters, there are references and discussions of related topics that haven’t been covered yet. Here you can find references to printed publications, Web sites, people, products, conferences, and research labs.

The section is arranged by chapter, and the order of material follows the order of the chapter as much as possible.

1. THE VISION

Ray Ozzie is quoted from personal correspondence with the Authors. Other references on cloud computing:

Hayes, B. 2008. “Cloud Computing.” ACM,
Communications of the ACM
51, Issue 7 ( July).

Gruman, Galen, and Eric Knorr. 2008. “What Cloud Computing Really Means.
InfoWorld
(April 7).

Martin, Richard, and J. Nicholas Hoover. 2008. “Guide to Cloud Computing.”
Information Week
(June 21).

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2).
http://aws.amazon.com/ec2Microsoft Azure Services Platform.
http://www.microsoft.com/azure

Science fiction that grapples with e-memories:

Sawyer, Robert J. 2003.
Hominids.
New York: Macmillan.

Halperin, James. 2000.
The Truth Machine.
New York: Ballantine Books.

Naim, Oscar. 2004.
The Final Cut.
Lions Gate Entertainment.

Westbrook, Robert. 2004.
The Final Cut.
New York: Penguin.

Another related sci-fi work is
The Observers,
where alien microrobots have been recording Earth’s history in incredible detail. People in the book grapple with being watched and recorded. The aliens are able to copy all of the information related to a person to create a virtual person, raising the issue of digital immortality.

Williamson, S. Gill. 2006.
The Observers.
Lincoln, Neb.: iUniverse.

Don Norman suggested the Teddy life recorder. His other books on design are also well worth reading.

Norman, Donald A. 1992.
Turn Signals Are the Facial Expression of Automobiles.
Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley.

The Millennials, aka Generation Y:

Howe, Neil, and William Strauss. 2000.
Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation.
New York: Random House.

Laurent, Anne. 2008. “Millennials: They’re Here. They’re Wired. Get Used to Them.”
Tech Insider
(March 24)
http://techinsider.nextgov.com

Safer, Morley. 2007. “The ‘Millennials’ Are Coming.”
CBS 60 Minutes
(May 25).
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/11/08/60minutes/main3475200.shtml

Olsen, Stefanie. 2005. “The ‘Millennials’ Usher in a New Era.” CNET
News.com
. (November 18).

Sweeney, Richard. 2006. “Millennial Behaviors and Demographics.”
http://library2.njit.edu/staff-folders/sweeney/Mi l len n ia ls/A rticle-Millennial-Behaviors. doc

Strauss and Howe have an interesting generational theory that could play into the issue of why the Millennials seem to have a different attitude to privacy and technology.

Strauss, William, and Neil Howe. 1997.
The Fourth Turning.
New York: Broadway Books.

———. 1991.
Generations: The History of America’s Future, 1584 to 2069.
New York: William Morrow and Company.

Abe Crystal’s Ph.D. study found that “although all the students I observed were generally comfortable with technology, there was a large variance in technology-related expertise and knowledge.” Gibbons and Foster (2007) were “surprised to find that students are on average no more proficient with computer technology than are librarians and faculty members. Some students demonstrated broad knowledge of computers and facility in using them, but others were awkward and clumsy.”

Crystal, Abe. 2008. Design research for Personal Information Management systems to support undergraduate students, doctoral dissertation, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

The International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors is the single most important projection about the future of semiconductors. It encompasses all memory, including nonvolatile Flash memory, processors, and radios. The 2007 Roadmap projects continued biennial doubling of semiconductor density until 2016. One implication is that semiconductor memories will replace disks for portable computers.

International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors Web site.
http://www.itrs.net

Disk Storage Roadmaps are available from individual vendors and market intelligence firms like IDC that show nearly annual doubling of disk densities.

Arai, Masayuki. 2009. “Optical Disks Used for Long-Term Storage by 2010.”
Tech-On!
(March 6).

Rydning, John, and Jeff Janukowicz. 2009. “Worldwide Hard Disk Drive Component 2008-2012 Forecast Update.” IDC (February 1).

There is a large research community advancing work on data mining, pattern recognition, and machine learning. Here are just a few starting points:

Bishop, Christopher M. 2006.
Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning.
New York: Springer.

Kargupta, H., et al. (eds.). 2009.
Next Generation of Data Mining.
London: Chapman and Hall.

ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining.

International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM).

SIAM International Conference on Data Mining.

Total Recall predicts the future based on technology trends. A similar book in this genre is
Being Digital,
which did a wonderful job in 1995 of predicting our digital lives today.

Negroponte, Nicholas. 1995.
Being Digital.
New York: Alfred A. K nopf.

2. MY LIFE BITS

Million Books Project (also called the Universal Library Project) Web site.
http://www.ulib.org

Project Gutenberg Web site.
http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page

Foer, Jonathan Safran. 2006.
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.
New York: Mariner Books.

Bill Gates and Jim Gray were inspirations to us.

Gates, Bill. 1996.
The Road Ahead.
New York: Penguin Books.

Gray, Jim. 1999. “What’s Next? A Dozen Information-Technology Research Goals.”
Journal of the ACM
50:41-57.

About the Aaron painting program:

Cohen, Harold. 1995. “The Further Exploits of AARON, Painter.”
Stanford Humanities Review
4, issue 2 (July): Constructions of the Mind.
http://www.stanford.edu/group/SHR/4-2/text/cohen.html

Memex was proposed by Bush in his
Atlantic Monthly
article.

Bush, Vannevar. 1945. “As We May Think.”
Atlantic Monthly
(July). Reprinted in
Life
magazine, September 10, 1945.
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/194507/bush

This book tells you much more about Bush, his life, and his amazing technological vision.

Nyce, James M., and Paul Kahn (eds.). 1992.
From Memex to Hypertext: Vannevar Bush and the Mind’s Machine.
Boston: Academic Press.

In this report, Bush proposes the National Science Foundation (NSF) and more.

Bush, Vannevar. 1945. “Science The Endless Frontier. A Report to the President by Vannevar Bush, Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, July 1945.” Washington, D.C.: United States Government Printing Office.
http://www.nsf.gov/about/history/vbush1945.htm
; also available as ACLS Humanities E-Book (August 1, 2008).

Some believe that Paul Otlet, not Bush, ought to get the credit for the concept of hyperlinks for his 1934 “réseau” idea.