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Recording Your Entire Life
Posted by
kdawson
on Tue Feb 20, 2007 05:03 PM
from the as-we-may-think dept.
from the as-we-may-think dept.
Scientific American has an article on Gordon Bell's 9-year-long experiment of recording great swaths of his life on digital media. The idea harks back to an article by Vannevar Bush in the 1940s, which arguably presaged hypertext and the Web as well. Bell, the father of the VAX computer and now with Microsoft Research, first published a paper on his experiment in CACM in 2001. The goal is to record "all of Bell's communications with other people and machines, as well as the images he sees, the sounds he hears and the Web sites he visits." Storage requirements are estimated at a modest 18 GB a year, 1.1 TB over a 60-year span. Not a lot if the article's projection comes to pass — that we will all be walking around with 1 TB of storage in our portable devices by 2015. The article is co-authored by Jim Gemmell, who wrote the software for the MyLifeBits project.
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Technology: MyLifeBits to Store Every Moment of Your Life 219 comments
Dixie_dean writes "Microsoft researchers are developing a way to enable you to capture every moment of your life and store it on your computer. The principal researcher with Microsoft's research arm, Gordon Bell, is developing a way for everyone to remember those special moments. 'The nine-year project, called MyLifeBits, has Bell supplementing his own memory by collecting as much information as he can about his life. He's trying to store a lifetime on his laptop. He's gone on to collect images of every Web page he's ever visited, television shows he's watched, recorded phone conversations, and images and audio from conference sessions, along with his e-mail and instant messages. Calculating that he saves about a gigabyte of information every month, he noted that he tries to only save photos of a megabyte or less. Bell figures one could store everything about his life, from start to finish, using a terabyte of storage." This is a project we've been talking about for a long time.
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robin williams movie anyone (Score:3, Interesting)
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You think they missed the mark? (Score:2)
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We have TB of HD space for what $700-$800? It's not quite there, yet. I get excited every time I look up the current prices/storage sizes of those USB thumb drives. When we can pick up 1TB of thumb drive space for $20-$40; this'll start happening far more than anyone previously thought.
I could see fol
go directly to jail... (Score:5, Insightful)
Letting all your crimes be known? Would you? (Score:5, Insightful)
A record like this almost needs to fall under the 5th amendment of non-self incrimination for a person to actually attempt this (which it does not of course).
It seems that it would either lead to a state of paranoia, or a person changing too much about their lives for it to be an accurate record of them.
I'd imagine that many people would change the people they associate with (who they wouldn't want to incriminate accidentally), the drugs they tried or saw, the women they talked to, the affairs they had, how they spent their money (and did their taxes!), the website they viewed, the books they read, the people they chatted with online or the porn they watched. Otherwise, they'd be nuts.
They would likely be arrested, dumped by their signifcant others, fired from their jobs, ridiculed by friends and family, etc..
I think the truth of it is that people (of all religions) need to realize that no one lives without fault/sin/whatever they call it, and be ready for the real brutal truth of all a person's dirty secrets.
I'm a musician/creative type and I know that I wouldn't want a hard record of everything that goes on around me. I'm sure that everyone else has seen/done things they wouldn't want expressed eventually to the entire world.
Parent
what crimes? (Score:2)
"Crimes" (Score:3, Insightful)
I'd hate to be arrested after being on stage (recording everything I saw) and some 17 year old girl flashed her tits at the stage. Opps, then i'd be slammed for recording child porn. And you're right. Walk down the street at Mardi Gras and opps... tits again. Maybe underage? No 2257 documentation? Slammer.
God forbid I
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I'm a musician/creative type and I know that I wouldn't want a hard record of everything that goes on around me. I'm sure that everyone else has seen/done things they wouldn't want expressed eventually to the entire world.
I think that it could be a good thing. I wouldn't want to be part of the 1-3rd generat
Re:Letting all your crimes be known? Would you? (Score:5, Insightful)
Just look at reality TV. A pretence of proprietary is there initially, then most of the retards they put on these shows either forget the cameras are there or choose to ignore them so long as they don't immediately feel the consequences of their actions. Then they come out and realise the came across as racists or manipulators or sluts or victims and realise hey there is a consequence to constantly being filmed. I suspect even non-cretins would fall victim to the same phenomenon.
Parent
Instant messenger chat logs (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Man I didn't know necro2607 was that into his wizard robe and hat.
only 18 GB ? (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
If he was looking up into space [slashdot.org], he'd be getting a heck of a lot more than 18GB. The human eye gets the equivalent of around 600 million pixels. [wikipedia.org]
He was featured in FastCompany ... (Score:4, Informative)
here it is [fastcompany.com] although there are a lot of pictures and sidebars that are missing from the original print article.
18GB/year (Score:3, Funny)
- 2007.02.16:20.31.19.GMT
movie://holy-grail-dircut/chapters/3
food://cheetos
observe://fingers/wrongcolor/orange
use://pants/wipe.cgi
or maybe he just sits in a dark room. a stream of 0's would compress pretty well.
immortality (Score:3, Funny)
1. Record all sensory information available to your brain from conception.
2. Grow a genetically identical clone of yourself.
3. Boot your clone from disk. If anything goes wonky, revert to a clean install.
Use appropriate DRM to prevent unlicensed copying.
zzz... (Score:2, Insightful)
Wedding videos. (Score:2)
Technological Children Much? (Score:5, Interesting)
Memory depends on your perception then and now more than anything. The reason some are going headfirst into this kind of research is because the kids with technology spend all their time in meaningless environments doing meaningless things, they grew up that way. Games are meaningless, TV is meaningless, this text; it's pretty much meaningless, as is the news and slashdot. They're all virtual things with no value to us. They feel as though their life is meaningless because they do meaningless things all god damn day long, and at the end of the day, when they go home, and try to get meaning out of their lives, they find themselves unable to feel like they have meaning. Living a meaningless life leads to a meaningless past. Hence, the reason they want to record it.
What isn't meaningless? Hugs and kisses from beautiful women. Cranking up an engine you spent 4 weeks rebuilding and taking a drive down to a pizza place 100 miles away to celebrate. Waking up in the morning after damn dear dieing the last day and taking your first breath. Sitting infront of the computer and grabbing a flab of skin and noticing you've lost a lot of weight.
Those things have meaning, and some people may want to record them or take a piece with them to prove they were here and they did this. Some of us have meaningfull lives that go places, and for us, there's no point to record it all; we've already got what we want right here, right now and the memories can be relegated to stories you tell buddies in bars at 2 am. For the rest of us, memories of the deceased are enough to get us through the day.
It's a technology for a sick culture.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm reminded of a story in the New York Times magazine several years ago, recounting some of the content from a release of KGB surveillance records. Every moment of Soviet suspect citizen's lives were documented, with one passage recounting how a particular citizen approached a hot dog stand, asked for a hot dog, waited as the hot dog was
Everything has meaning (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm glad you've found more meaning in your life, though. That is always a good thing. Just don't shut out those "meaningless" parts, they may have more meaning than you thought at the time.
Parent
How do you know what's meaningful? (Score:3, Insightful)
I'll love to do it but... (Score:2)
Thoughts (Score:3, Insightful)
This will be highly inadvisable until such time as we are all forced to have them. At which point it will be illegal for your lawyer to advise you not to have one.
At the point at which they become ubiquitous, you will either have a mass boycott of copyright (because people will not be permitted to record that part of their life) or a mass revolt against it causing it to be stricken down because people want to be able to record everything they see.
I think that is only reasonable of course; why should only those with eidetic recall be permitted to remember every detail of a movie?
Weblogs are my memory. (Score:2)
For the most part, I don't care about remembering everything. I want to remember the good stuff, the funny stuff, and the important stuff. The key to memory is having a good editor.
Re:Weblogs ... speaking of wives (Score:3, Interesting)
First, I assume your blog is secure, if it wasn't you should have corrected that by now. Second, a whole lot of you people seem to be missing one of the fundamental benefits! Being able to say "I told you so" and prove it. That would apply to auto insurance, malpractice, shoddy customer service and arguments with your oh so significant other.
Here is how it should work:
I wear glasses (used to have contacts) and I can easily imagine a pair of glasses where the spring in them is just a little longer and on
kinda repetitive (Score:2, Funny)
perhaps in the future you could record your entire life, watiching someone else's life, who's been watching someone else's life on a mac
hmmm
I wonder how many Gb would be taken up just taking a piss
and how well it would compress with x264 over a period of several years
Who cares? (Score:2)
But why do you think that your descendants will care? How much of your ancestors' lives would you be willing to sit through? Would you give up "American Idol" to sit through your great-grandfather's off-key redition of "A Bicycle Built For Two"?
Yes, but... (Score:3, Insightful)
How will he safety store these terrabytes?
The making of... (Score:2, Insightful)
An opposite of the 'leave no trace' philosophy (Score:3, Insightful)
Wait, buy me some Seagate stock!
Cool! Will I be able... (Score:2, Funny)
nice project for a person, worthless to the masses (Score:4, Insightful)
But this idea that everyone will be doing this seems pretty stupid to me. If we recorded everything we did, without revolutionary advancements in search or data mining technology (which the article recognizes), that information would be worthless for most cases with the exception of things for which you know an exact date or time. So you want to know what you did Jan 4, 2003, no problem. Want to know the last time you saw a kid flying a kite in the park? Problem, unless you want to search the video of each time you were in the park. Want to remember that song that you liked that was playing when you were driving with your brother in the car, but can't remember when it happened? Problem unless you want to replay all the audio of you two in the car. The article discusses using metadata to "tag" events, but this is cumbersome with currect technology (as the article also recognizes). Most "tags" would need to be manually added, which would still be a problem even if voice recognition software made it easier to add the tags. We could solve the problem of remembering parts of conversations if voice recognition software converted all speech into a searchable form, but we aren't quite at that level yet.
FTA: An ordinary notebook PC can run a database that is more powerful and almost 100 times as large as that of a major bank of the 1980s. An inexpensive cell phone can surf the Web, play videos and even understand some speech.
Yeah, and a decade before that in 1976, the CRAY-1 [wikipedia.org] was impressive. Sorry if beating an 80s computer doesn't allay my feelings that our computers can't handle the massive amount of data that the article discusses.
The article talks about logging health information that would allow the doctor to see early warning signs of things like heart attacks. I'm not going to preted to know all of the warning signs for heart attacks, but it seems to me that many of them are only valid when certain other factors are present as well. For example, if your heart rate is high, its probably not a warning sign if you are also running a marathon. FTA: "Sensors can also log the three billion or so heartbeats in a person's lifetime, along with other physiological indicators". Yeah, have fun running the queries to search through the roughly 40 million heartbeats you have each year while comparing that to the other important factors that determine heart attacks, and then do it again for other diseases.
I'm sure there are a ton of great uses for this technology. I just don't think that we are anywhere near diong all of the things the article wants, and even if we were, it would end up making more work for people. With that said, consider how this might affect our brains. When I was young, I had my closest friends' phone numbers memorized, along as a few of their addresses. Once I got a cell phone, I slowly forgot every number I knew. Up until a year a year ago, my mom, who just got a cell phone 3 years ago, could remember the number of the first house she lived in. As we develop technology that remembers things for us, what happens to our ability to remember?
Robert Shields (Score:3, Informative)
SenseCam info (Score:3, Interesting)
Here [microsoft.com] is where you can get more geeky information about the SenseCam that Bell uses. It senses body heat and changes in light level to take pictures which are considered "interesting".
--Rob
subpoenas (Score:5, Interesting)
It was the first week, and the first time the big boss took some interest in me. Lunch was expensive - he paid.
We chatted, dug in. He said a connection I needed to remember and follow up with.
I pulled out 'my book', the latest leather bound notebook I had kept religiously throughout my graduate life and after. It was just the latest book, like the 4 others before it that I had filled and put on the shelf. At any meeting - the date at the top, notes in delicate print, people, emails, good points - all the things I needed to recall later. Two years later, if I needed the name of that person in the 5th seat from the right from BigCo, Inc.,
The boss's eyes widened, his head tilted -- he said, bluntly: "What's that?"
"Oh, I keep a book with notes."
"Oh" he said, pausing, "we don't do that here."
There was then an even longer, more awkward pause. I scrunched my brow furiously trying not to look too stupid. My eyes darted. "Huh?" I'm thinking, like "What? Write notes in a restaurant?"
"That is a subpoena waiting to happen", he continued. We then talked at length about how things happen in the real world. That was 4 years ago. I learned a lot from him. I don't keep books any more...
Since then I've quit a few times, been fired a few times, sued, been through 2 trials, won one, lost one, hired and fired a bunch of people, and now I'm running a startup. Fun times.
Long story short: IF I ever did record anything, I'd certainly never tell anyone that I had it. There is simply too much risk of it being used against me in the current litigation-crazy world, both from other people and from the state.
self-centered nerds (Score:3, Insightful)
Wait a minute... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Note to self: (Score:5, Interesting)
Such as entering a movie theater?
Record your life, so long as your life doesn't contain any copyrighted works.
Parent
Re:Note to self: (Score:5, Insightful)
Laugh while you can. Before long, turning off your Life Recorder will be considered a presumption of guilt.
The use of Life Recorders is only dangerous insofar as our society's ideology is broken. Whereas right now, there are so many loopholes, we can afford to believe stupid things ("it shall be illegal for an adult male to have penetrative sex with another adult male...") because there is so much room to hide from the law. Indeed, the deepest benefit of privacy is that it shields the lives of individuals from the ideologies of their neighbors.
By way of illustration, we all share (i.e. de-privatize) ourselves with people to the extent that they share our own ideology.
Parent
Re:Note to self: (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Re:Note to self: (Score:5, Interesting)
Presumably you would encrypt your observations before storing them. Then it's just a matter of whether and under what circumstances the government can force you to reveal your passphrase.
My guess is that, faced with this novel situation, a judge might rule that if the police have probable cause to believe you were involved in a crime at a particular time, the court can demand your observations for that time period be decrypted, but aren't entitled to view your entire life. Failure to comply might keep you in jail for contempt of court.
A very strong argument could be made, though, that the 5th Amendment entitles us to refuse to disclose our passphrases. I confess I don't know the state of case law on this.
Parent
Re:Note to self: (Score:4, Insightful)
Turn recording device off BEFORE committing crimes!
or anything that might be embarrassing out of context
or anything that might clash with the feds current policy
or visiting the doctor
or talking to someone who might say something "inappropriate"
or looking at the wrong web page
or writing "I hate big brother" in your paper diary.
Or you could just use free software and encourage others to do the same before big brother can outlaw it along with the rest of your freedoms. Who on Earth is going to trust M$ with a life recorder?
Parent
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The cartoon depiction of angels on our shoulders did come to my mind when we were discussing it. The popular notion is not the same as in Islam since they are influencing your actions, not recording them. However Islam has been around for a long time,
Those around him... (Score:5, Insightful)
Personally, the idea of this creeps me out. I mean, if you want to completely destroy your own privacy, I guess that's okay, but if you want to damage the my privacy by recording everything I do in your presence, then that's different.
Parent
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