Recording Your Entire Life 211
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.
go directly to jail... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:You think they missed the mark? (Score:3, Insightful)
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 folks using cell phones to silently record everything. We'd need some high speed automated way for a program to search an audio stream for selected text, or for all the audio to be converted to text with it noted, which different speakers are talking. We'd need the same to apply to video as well, but I think that'd be harder. I could see people streaming their life to video.google.com or some other site. It's only a matter of time.
Or he could do it the easy way... (Score:1, 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.
zzz... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:robin williams movie anyone (Score:2, Insightful)
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?
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.
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?
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!
Re:robin williams movie anyone (Score:2, Insightful)
"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 saw or smoked some weed, or left a beer bottle sitting somewhere backstage that someone that was 20 got ahold of.
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?
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.
Re:Those around him... (Score:3, Insightful)
self-centered nerds (Score:3, Insightful)
How do you know what's meaningful? (Score:3, Insightful)
Would you say that animals live meaningful lives or meaningless lives? Most of the ancients thought that animals had meaningless lives, since animals can't think, which they held to be the highest activity, but your examples seem to suggest that since you think physical activities like hard work and flirting (step one to reproduction) are meaningful, animals can also lead meaningful lives by living naturally or whatever.
I'm really curious about your criteria here, since from a scientific/materialistic/evolutionary perspective, humans are just a type of animal, so nothing human can do could ever be "unnatural," just natural in a different way, much as the natural actions of a chimp are different from the natural actions of a bacteria. Thus, I find naturalness as a gauge of meaningfulness to be problematic, since there is no way to tell the natural from the unnatural except to suppose that the human animal shouldn't have changed its environment as it has.