Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything (7 page)

Here’s an example of what we can do with MyLifeBits, courtesy of a database design with good metadata and complete indexing. Say I’m trying to remember the name of a biotech entrepreneur I read about several years ago. I can’t remember his name or his company or anything else specific enough for a standard search. What I do remember is that I read about him on the Web, the article involved biotech, it was between two and four years ago, I was at the office, and it was during a fairly long phone call with Jim Gemmell—say, ten minutes or longer. Those are pretty vague parameters, but they’re enough for MyLifeBits to winnow the selection down to just a handful of archived Web pages. I quickly find the name I need.

In my old files-and-folder system, I had metadata, such as date of publication, name of person, et cetera, embedded in long file names. But in the database, we could have an actual publication-date field that I could use for sorting and searching.

Unfortunately, we didn’t have the manpower to make all the existing programs out there work smoothly with our database, so we ended up having our database keep an eye on a regular file-and-folder system and stay synchronized with it. This gave the folder system more prominence than we would have liked, and made the overall system more fragile, but that was the reality of creating prototypes with limited resources. Thankfully, it was just a nuisance, not a serious roadblock. Our software still looked pretty much the same, and we still could learn from real-life experience with this kind of storage, no matter what was under the hood. We were up and running.

CAPTURE EVERYTHING, DISCARD NOTHING

While we were thinking through the memory organization problems, I continued capturing and saving more and more of my life bits. The project mantra had become: Capture everything, discard nothing.

We made it a goal to make capture as automatic as possible; otherwise I knew I just wouldn’t capture enough. We enhanced my Web browser to record a copy of every Web page I visited—not just the URL that points to it, but a copy of everything on the page. The advantage of this is that it solves the problem of “link rot,” the process in which hyperlinks gradually become invalid, one by one. Link rot happens for several reasons. Web sites sometimes restructure their content, change hosts, get bought up, or go extinct. Other Web sites make content free and viewable when it’s fresh but disable the links after a few weeks. Another problem arises with sites that are continuously edited, such as political position papers and Wikipedia entries. Creating a copy of every page I visit in the exact form it had at the time circumvents all these problems. Furthermore, it is often easier to find a page from my collection of seen pages, rather than search for it out of the entire Web.

This page-logging can be turned off so that I can visit sites without having them go in my e-memory. However, with all the storage at my disposal, there’s not much point. I literally can’t surf the Web fast enough to incur a significant storage cost.

I also started recording all my instant messaging and saving all my e-mails, minus the spam (just like my paper, I want to keep what I actually read, not what marketers force into my in-box).

We set up hardware to record telephone calls in my office. If you call me, you will first hear a voice say, “Recording.” This notifies you that the call is being recorded, as is required by California law (not to mention common courtesy). I can settle any dispute about what was said on a conference call by instantly retrieving the audio file. My alibi in court, if I ever need one, will be ironclad to the extent I can prove that I didn’t fabricate it.

We started tracking all kinds of things: the number of mouse and keyboard clicks, every time a document was opened, every window shown on my PC screen, and the history of my music playback. We logged every search. I bought a GPS and started loading my location history into MyLifeBits.

We even experimented with recording radio and television shows. Digital video recorders (or DVRs) such as TiVo were just coming out, and we wondered what it would be like to keep everything when it came to TV. We built our own DVR and set it up with nearly two terabytes of storage—more than twenty times the capacity of the early DVRs. If you think your TV program guide is big, try wading through more than a thousand shows, all of which are actually interesting to you. And radio was a totally different experience. We recorded lots of National Public Radio shows, including
Prairie Home Companion, Car Talk,
and news. We played the audio back on a Pocket PC, so it was like a cross between TiVo and podcasting. Jim Gemmell learned that he fast-forwarded through all but fifteen minutes of a typical news hour.

But I quickly lost interest in TV and radio because such shows would soon be archived and available on demand. Having your own copy is not so special if you can just have it streamed to you through the ether anytime you please. It’s still worthwhile to have your lifelog make a record of what you watched and when, but not to copy the program itself.

By October 2003, I still wasn’t wearing the walnut-sized camera strapped to my forehead that Bush had predicted. But Lyndsay Williams, a colleague from the Microsoft Research Laboratory in Cambridge, England, had come up with something even more interesting. She called it the SenseCam. About the size of a cigarette pack that hangs from a cord around your neck, the SenseCam is a fisheye camera that takes pictures automatically. When it detects a change in light level it presumes you’ve passed through a door or otherwise changed your setting, and snaps a picture. When its passive infrared sensor detects the appearance of a warm body, it snaps a picture of whoever just came into view. An accelerometer lets the SenseCam know when to delay taking a picture to avoid motion blur. And of course, you can point the SenseCam and take photos at will rather than waiting for it to take the initiative.

Lyndsay once confided that one reason she developed the SenseCam was to find her misplaced eyeglasses. By scanning SenseCam images, she can find the last place she put them down.

One of my favorite examples of how the SenseCam enhances life comes from Cathal Gurrin, a lecturer at Dublin City University in Ireland. Cathal set out to perform a year-long experiment, wearing the SenseCam during all his waking hours. When the year was over, many people expected him to be glad to stop. In fact, he wouldn’t give the SenseCam back. Cathal began wearing the SenseCam daily in June 2006 and, as I write, has worn the SenseCam for almost three years, acquiring over three million photos. Gurrin has a collection of his favorite photos rotating on a digital photo album on his desk which he shows off with the enthusiasm of a new parent with baby pictures. “Look,” he says, “here’s a picture of the first moment I met my girlfriend—not that I knew she’d become my girlfriend at the time.”

A fun thing to do is to play back all the SenseCam images from a day or a week in rapid succession, which takes just a few minutes. Talk about your life flashing before your eyes! It’s an amazing feeling to see your life on fast-forward like that.

I enjoyed taking the SenseCam on walkabouts with my GPS. I could later reconstruct my travels on an animated map, with pictures taken along the way to tell the story. The best series I did was an eight-hour trip along the Great Ocean Road in Australia and through a treetop walk in a rain forest.

My SenseCam has captured many special moments, especially at parties, lunches, and conference exhibits. I have a sequence of when I was admitted to the hospital for heart bypass surgery in July 2007. My partner, Sheridan, wore the camera as I was wheeled into the operating room.

THE DAY OF CARPE

By 2004, we were so excited about where MyLifeBits was taking us, and saw so much potential, that we wanted to encourage others to get involved. Jim Gemmell launched a workshop at ACM Multimedia 2004, a professional conference for computer scientists. The theme of the workshop, which was held annually for three years, was CARPE: Continuous Archival and Retrieval of Personal Experiences.

In 2005 we invited universities to submit proposals for research projects. We received eighty submissions and selected fourteen of them to receive money, SenseCams, and our software. I was thrilled at the wonderful results from academia, touching into many areas and ideas we would never have thought of, from helping disabled students to logging therapy sessions for stroke victims.

As of this writing I have 261 gigabytes of information saved on my main computer and about 100 gigabytes accessible in my cloud. I add about one gigabyte a month. This doesn’t include continuous audio and video, but that’s on the horizon.

The MyLifeBits software is far from perfect. The hardware right now is clunky enough that I don’t use it all the time (I hate dealing with heaps of batteries and chargers!). But between MyLifeBits and the work of our colleagues in the research community, we believe we have a proof of concept. We’ve built and experienced enough to confidently endorse Total Recall.

We will be taking a tour of how Total Recall has affected my life so far and how it will affect your life, in ways direct and indirect, large and small, as e-memory becomes standard furniture in our daily lives. Before we get to the effects Total Recall can have on work, health, learning, and our personal relationships, we need to take a deeper look at what science can tell us about the meeting of e-memory and bio-memory, that stuff that resides in our heads.

CHAPTER 3

THE MEETING OF E-MEMORY AND BIO-MEMORY

I was invited to a birthday party for computer graphics pioneer Ivan Sutherland. Would I be willing to say a few words?

Great,
I thought.
I can get up and tell them I run into Ivan about every five years, and we enjoy our conversations.

Honestly, that was all that came to me. Then I entered Ivan’s name into the search window in MyLifeBits, and to my surprise and relief, I immediately recalled emotionally evocative and intellectually intriguing details I had completely forgotten. Around 1963, when Ivan had been a first lieutenant stationed at the National Security Administration, he and I designed a display computer. A few years later, he had been instrumental in my becoming a professor at Carnegie Mellon University. Much more recently, Ivan had started opening his talks with “Gordon Bell and I have a friendly debate over whether I’ve wasted my life working on asynchronous logic.” (Come to think of it, I hope he’ll take my thousand-dollar bet that asynchronous logic will be widely recognized as a waste of time by 2020).

My biological memory had reduced my relationship with Ivan down to the humdrum, but my e-memory stepped in to restore the significance of our history, making it possible for me to compose a fitting toast for his birthday.

We all want better recall. The market for memory enhancement books, elixirs, computer programs, devices, and games is gigantic.

As people get older, they start to get paranoid about small memory lapses. When a forty-year-old misplaces his car keys, he feels annoyed. When a sixty-five-year-old loses the keys, he starts Googling about Alzheimer’s disease. In his search he might read about another condition known as mild cognitive impairment, which afflicts as much as 5 percent of the population past the age of seventy. It’s very real, and very scary.

The fear of oblivion before death is big enough to drive a $4.2 billion industry in medicinal herbs and supplements for memory enhancement. Health-food emporium shelves are stocked with herbs, micronutrients, antioxidants, tonics, supplements, and potions to boost your brainpower. Labels on bottles of coenzyme Q10, ginseng, ginkgo biloba, rosemary, and salvia promise to keep your mind nimble.

In 2007, the U.S. market for brain-fitness programs and “neuro-software” was $225 million. Nintendo sells a product called Brain Age that claims it can help you “[get] the most out of your prefrontal cortex!” The software program MindFit combines cognitive assessment of more than a dozen different skills with a personalized training regimen based on that assessment. Dr. Michael Merzenich, a neuroscientist at the University of California in San Francisco, developed a set of computer tools called the Brain Fitness Program intended to increase processing speeds in aging brains. And for about ten dollars a month, you can subscribe to Web sites like
Lumosity.com
and
Happy-Neuron.com
to tap into a variety of cognitive training exercises.

You can also buy books on how to exercise your brain with games, puzzles, and memory tricks. You can learn about the biology and behavior of memory from books such as
In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind
by Nobel Laureate Eric Kandel and
The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers
by Harvard University psychologist Daniel Schacter.

For all I know, ginkgo biloba and the Brain Fitness Program will indeed improve your bio-memory. But the world of Total Recall promises something broader: a revolution.

THE INESCAPABLE FRAILTY OF BIO-MEMORY

The memories in our brains are stored as patterns of connections between neurons, or nerve cells. Computers store information in a series of microscopic switches turned on or off. Brains and computers both store information, manipulate it, and use it to decide between courses of action. For these reasons we say that both systems have “memory,” but this similarity only holds up in the first approximation. Scratch the surface and you find vast differences between biological and digital memory.

To the owner of a human brain, memory feels like a single resource. It turns out this feeling is an illusion. Scientists who study biological memory describe three distinct systems:

• Procedural memory, sometimes known as muscle memory, is for physical skills such as riding a bike, ballet dancing, typing.

• Semantic memory encodes meanings, definitions, and concepts—facts that you know that aren’t rooted in time or place, such as “A cat has four legs” or “The capital of Japan is Tokyo.”