Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything (9 page)

Total Recall software will get better and better at spotting the interesting moments for you as we acquire more data such as your pulse, the pitch and volume of your voice, or even the brain waves you are emitting. Researchers at the University of Tokyo have already demonstrated a baseball cap that records both video and alpha waves from your brain. Based on the alpha waves, they can do a pretty good job of guessing what segments of the video were interesting.

For an e-memory, there’s no drawback to capturing the long stretches of banality that comprise most of life, there are only potential benefits. Go ahead and fill it with et ceteras, so ons, and ad nauseams. The more you record, the better.

Your mind can be freed from mundane memorization. Let your e-memory remember each detail, and show you the average, the maximum, the chart, the patterns, or the unusual. Then when you decide that one particular area bears further investigation, you can recall all the gory details—perhaps the actual data points, or some additional photos. Knowing that your e-memory has the task of perfectly remembering allows you to concentrate on more interesting things.

E-memories not only relieve you of memorizing what you don’t care much about, they can also help your bio-memory remember what counts.

My friend Sunil Vemuri is the CTO of reQall, a really fascinating memory-aid product. I use reQall to create reminders and notes for myself. I call up their phone number and say, “Add.” There’s a beep and then I make some comment, perhaps, “Book the flights for my vacation.” I can retrieve this reminder by calling in later and saying, “Recall,” instead of “Add.” I also get an e-mail, with a recording of what I said, and even a transcription of what I said. Besides using the phone and e-mail, I can use other interfaces like a Web browser and instant messenger. Being able to create and retrieve memos in all these ways is very powerful. I even use the phone to create dear-diary entries: I can be driving along, place a call on my cell phone, and tell a little story that ends up transcribed in my e-mail and also with my own voice recorded.

All that was exciting enough to get me to join reQall’s board, but Sunil expanded my vision of what is possible when he visited Jim Gemmell a little while ago. They sat down in Gemmell’s office and were chatting about all kinds of Total Recall ideas (when Sunil was still a graduate student at MIT he got involved in the CARPE research community, so he’s been a coconspirator with us for years). In the course of the conversation, Sunil made reference to Gemmell’s family, and even what school Gemmell’s oldest son attends. Gemmell had only mentioned this once, and that was more than a year ago, so he was astonished at Sunil’s memory. But Sunil gave up his secret later.

“Do you know how I remembered about your family and your son’s school?” he asked.

Gemmell shook his head and Sunil went on. “After our last meeting, I called reQall and spoke some notes about our meeting, including those facts about your family. Now, I also have reQall programmed to play random facts to me every so often. Since our last meeting, I’ve heard those facts about your family a couple of times, so now I remember them.”

This kind of memory refresh is the driving factor behind another product called SuperMemo. Instead of just randomly remind ing you, SuperMemo considers the typical pattern of memory loss. Cognitive scientists have measured how memories typically fade, and can plot the odds of your forgetting something after first hearing it, after one reminder, after two reminders, and so on. Supermemo intervenes when the odds of your losing the memory reach a certain level, say 15 percent. For instance, two days after hearing something, you might be projected to have a 15 percent chance of forgetting the fact, so you are reminded. Eight days later, you again are projected to have more than 15 percent odds of forgetting, so you are reminded again, and so on, with the time between reminders growing longer and longer.

RETAINING PAINFUL MEMORIES

When I give talks about MyLifeBits, someone in the audience usually says something like, “But isn’t forgetting a good thing sometimes? Isn’t the idea of recording our lives in excruciating detail actually a rather bad idea? Don’t we need to forget?”

Everyone has experienced embarrassing moments he’d rather forget. You’re the quarterback who ran the wrong way down the football field. You called your lover by the name of an ex-flame. One of my most embarrassing memories was shown on the Business Channel in 1983. I was one of a dozen company founders sitting at a table, explaining to the press our plan of merging with another company to turn our fortunes around. There was only one hitch with this ill-fated plan: We had nothing to sell. I have nothing but scorn for product announcements without an actual product, and here I was in the thick of it. Every time I think of it I feel an echo of the original horror I felt clamoring around in my gut—which is why I try not to think about it very much.

But you can easily avoid replaying such memories. And who knows? Maybe someday when you’re old and gray and retired and you look back across your life with the expanded perspective that often comes in the winter of life, you might actually be able to look back at your old fumbles, gaffes, faux pas, and humiliations and gain closure on them, forgive yourself for them, even laugh at the ultimately petty little anxieties that used to seem so serious. In a perverse way I would love to have a copy of the Business Channel tape just to see whether I was crawling under the table just as I wish to remember the moment. I know I don’t mind watching a 1972 video of me making a shortsighted prediction about where computing was headed.

But what about the really, truly bad memories? Not the harmless embarrassments that still make you blush, but the ones that are so compromising or potentially harmful—to your reputation, to your loved ones, or to your own sanity—that you just can’t abide the thought of keeping them?

What about a woman who’s been abused by her husband? When she finally escapes him and gets help putting a new life together, what could be more unwelcome than digital records of the horror that had been her life? The last thing she wants to do is relive the insults, the threats, the cat-and-mouse mind games, the screams, the beatings, and the bruises. It would only be natural for her to want to delete every last bit of it.

What about a young man who makes some bad decisions in high school? He makes the wrong friends, starts experimenting with drugs, and ends up in a stoned stupor in the backseat of a stolen car. He is arrested, and the experience with the juvenile justice system scares him straight. The state expunges his juvenile record and he goes on to become a law-abiding citizen with a family and a profession. In a world with no records, he could easily leave the past behind. In a world where most things are recorded and saved, would he have the same chance?

Nevertheless, I still advocate keeping everything, even the worst of it. They are your e-memories; you control the keys to them. Rather than erase them, you can seal them up. You can put a lock on those events you’d like to forget and never open them up again. What you really want to prevent in these cases is unwanted
recall,
not retention.

Imagine the abused woman has audio and video recordings of the abuse she endured. She has escaped, gotten treatment, and is living in a new city without fear. Her recordings can easily be locked so that they’ll never come up in regular interactions with her e-memory. But she may want keep them for legal proceedings. Or she may want to share them with future therapists.

Imagine the young man who was arrested, now grown older and involved in a community effort to block a new commercial development. His opponents start to circulate stories that he was a hard-core criminal in his youth, with gang connections lasting to this day. He finds it in his interest to show his youth record to defend himself against this slander.

Our impulse to hit the delete key may not be the right move to lock away the past. Daniel Schacter advises that “confronting, disclosing, and integrating those experiences we would most like to forget is the most effective counter to [unwanted recall].”

LOST BUT NOT FORGOTTEN

I have personal experience with unwanted recall using MyLifeBits. On Sunday January 28, 2007, my manager and dear friend Jim Gray took his forty-foot yacht,
Tenacious,
on a solo sailing trip out to the Farallon Islands near San Francisco. He went to scatter his mother’s ashes in the wild seascape around the rugged islands.

But Jim never returned. Despite clear weather and no signs of distress from his well-equipped yacht, Jim mysteriously vanished. A massive three-week search did not produce a single clue as to what had happened. As
The New York Times
reported, “A veritable Who’s Who of computer scientists from Google, Amazon, Microsoft, NASA, and universities across the country spent sleepless nights writing ad hoc software, creating a blog, and reconfiguring satellite images so that dozens of volunteers could pore over them, searching for a speck of red hull and white deck among a sea of gray pixels.”

For several months after Jim’s disappearance, I was deeply disturbed every time a picture of him came up on my screensaver. I avoided going into the office where we had worked. I was overcome with emotion. It was too painful for me to see his smiling face. Some people in my situation would have deleted those pictures, hoping it would bring relief or catharsis. But with time, my frame of mind changed. The same pictures now bring back happy memories and nourish my spirit. I’m glad I still have so many images of my old friend.

I used some of the pictures when I was asked to speak at Jim’s memorial service. I knew my emotions would get the better of me on the day, so I planned to get myself out of an actual speaking role. I used Microsoft’s Movie Maker to load my collected snapshots of Jim. The software allowed me to drag and drop in special effects, such as fading from one photograph to the next. I wrote a script that I voiced-over the pictures, and concluded with Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here.”

It took more than a week to create. When it was shown at the service, tears welled up in eyes all over the auditorium, including mine. My e-memory, working alongside my bio-memory, told the story of Jim and me, how our paths had crossed, and how rich my life became because of him.

There are many ways to create stories. My mother spent several months typing the story of her family, the Gordons (I’m named after her). It’s about twenty-five pages long and it’s chock ful of stories about her family and about growing up as wonderful twentieth-century inventions like the automobile, electricity, and telephony became a part of her life—things we would have never known without those twenty-five pages. There’s only one thing wrong with it. I should have had her record it in her own voice.

That’s the kind of omission that will soon be a thing of the past.

PART TWO

CHAPTER 4

WORK

I
like working. About six thousand people worked for me when I was head of research and development at Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) from 1972 to 1983, before it became a part of Hewlett-Packard. I’ve been involved in more than a hundred start-up companies—that’s an average of about four a year since I started. I’ve served on government panels, offered my thoughts in think tanks, given talks to all kinds of audiences, and met with countless young entrepreneurs to hear pitches for my involvement in their great new ventures.

As an angel investor, my interests are both literally and figuratively all over the map, so it is a juggling act keeping up on all the different technologies, business plans, and people whizzing in and out of my orbit. I’ve been vowing for a couple of decades to reduce my travel, but still end up with more than fifty thousand air miles every year (at five hundred miles per hour that is two hours per week in the air—far from extreme in our frequent-flyer age). And then there’s my day job, working to advance Microsoft’s technology for e-memories, Total Recall, and data-intensive science. So my calendar is usually full, and it’s a challenge to get everything done.

At DEC, I used to get out of the office and go home when I wanted to actually accomplish anything because I was so inun dated with interaction at headquarters. My schedule was kept in calendar notebooks, in pencil. My home and work offices used to be crammed with filing cabinets, bookshelves, and great teetering heaps of paper covering most of the available horizontal space. It wasn’t actually as chaotic as it probably looked to others. I had a system in place—I am an engineer, after all—but still, the thought of ever going back to that way of organizing things sends a different kind of shiver down my spine.

In those days I was a “piler”—I created a pile of paper for each problem or topic that came my way. I wish I had a photo of the pile wall of my home office in Lincoln, Massachusetts, where I lived. The wall was roughly twenty-five feet long. It had six rows of shelves, providing room for around two hundred problem piles. When a memo, report, article, or something relevant to the issue came in, I merely stacked it on the right pile. Items were filed archaeologically, that is, deposited in layers over time. They were retrieved by lifting stacks of paper to reveal the archaeological era of the paper I wanted. I’ve met a lot of fellow pilers over the years, and seen some impressively high piles, especially in universities.

Total Recall will make it possible to deal with a prolific and even hectic work pace, far above our current expectations—and still remain sane. It will help make you more productive, whether you are a busy traveling salesperson or a parent frantically chauf feuring your kids between school and activities.

Being essentially paperless will be a big factor in this improvement. Instead of archaeological digging, a few keystrokes and mouse clicks will get what you need. Paperless offices are far more pleasant, and somehow calming.

Total Recall will also give everyone an incredible sense of freedom. Travel anywhere, anytime, and maintain complete access to every detail concerning your enterprise. I’ve experienced a taste of these benefits already, but work lives in the coming generation will become amazingly more powerful generators of prosperity and satisfaction.