Bell now documents about one gigabyte of information every month, all of which is stored in a searchable database on his PC. His is a highly manual process, but he expects that in as few as 15 years it will be common to carry nearly all our "memories" around with us in a single device that will automatically record the sound and video of our daily activities, creating an inventory of the conversations we have, the faces we see and the articles we read. That data would be tied to communications that are already tracked electronically, like e-mail and event calendars, as well as TV shows, movies and other media we take in. The end result: on-demand total recall.
(Via PAG E-News.)
This scheme fits in nicely with my own ambitious blogging plans.
3 comments:
If you've been married, or had siblings, you know quite intimately how being in the same room hearing the same words about the same experience can exhibit a chasm of different interpretations between what each of you claim was the reality. This can sometimes happen even when someone is shown the documentation of what happened.
Of course if we have the ability to edit tapes and videos and images, the government could do it too, and what you thought happened may not be backed up by the documentation that will be produced.
Anyway, it's not the external, documentable stuff that makes you who you really are, but the your mind ordering and interpreting your experiences and perceptions. You bring attitude, past history, temperament, chemistry and genetics to it, and make those shared experiences your own individual reading. You can't document that spark of mental synthesis, at the edges where the boundaries meet, which is what the human mind provides.
Bell's documentation sounds so reductionist that I don't see where the role of the mind enters into it at all.
Carol Maltby
You can't document that spark of mental synthesis, at the edges where the boundaries meet, which is what the human mind provides.
I make it pretty clear in my essay that producing the "spark of mental synthesis" isn't what I'm after. I'd simply like to lay the groundwork for a neat information-retrieval system.
Bell's documentation sounds so reductionist that I don't see where the role of the mind enters into it at all.
The mind doesn't enter into it; nor is is it meant to. Bell's hypothetical device is essentially a hands-free Palm Pilot -- but that doesn't mean it's not a cool idea.
What namely you're saying is a terrible mistake.
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