Every futurist does a lot of scanning. I have to (or try to) read a tremendous amount of stuff, in a variety of formats-- things published on the Web, articles in PDF or Word, PowerPoint presentations, old-fashioned words on paper, and articles on the radio. (This blog is essentially an attempt to leverage that work, to turn it from a public resource into a public good.) One of the biggest problems I have comes when I want to track down something I read or heard in passing two or three weeks ago, and which now is relevant to a project I'm working on. We have lots of good tools for managing information that we know is important; the big challenge comes in retrieving something that you thought was irrelevant, but turns out to be an indicator of some emerging trend.
I've often wondered why there isn't a tool to help with this kind of problem-- a kind of Google that would just index everything you've read, rather than everything on the Web. The closest I've come has been a product called iRemember; unfortunately, it only works on the Macintosh, and hasn't been updated for OS X. So I soldier on.
If someone asked me, "Would you want to be able to store and remember everything you've ever read, written, or even seen and said?" I'd say "Yes!" without hesitating. Or I would have. I'm now having second thoughts... just at a point when we can confidently say that such a technology will be available in the next decade.
There are several efforts to create a technology to record everything you say, do, and read. Some of the projects aren't designed specifically with that purpose in mind, but would make it possible. One example is Intel's personal server project, recently described in an article on vunet:
Within 10 years we could be carrying personal computing devices that store our every word and deed, according to chip giant Intel.Speaking at the Intel Developer Forum in San Jose, senior Intel researcher Roy Want unveiled a prototype device which the company calls a Personal Server.
He explained that the matchbox-sized PC could be used to store a wide variety of personal information that could be accessed by many different devices.
"Storage capacity is growing in leaps and bounds. By 2012 you will be able to carry a device that could record a lifetime's conversations. It would take about three terabytes of data to do," said Want.
"To include video you'd need 97 terabytes, which is expected to be economically viable at current development rates by 2014."
The concept is interesting not just for what it says about how steep the curve of Moore's Law is getting, but for what it assumes about the built environment of a decade from now, and the ways pervasive computing could affect memory and identity. Wireless Review's July 2003 article on the personal server project notes that:
The personal server... will do away with the display screen and the keyboard-- at least in the device you carry in your pocket. "A lot of research for mobility has looked at things like PDAs, or combining computers with cell phones," said Want, Intel Research's principal engineer. "But these devices have not been very successful."... He is working on a device that makes any PC become your PC. 'You can walk up to any computer, make a connection and bring up a window which makes that computer look like yours," he said. "As storage capacity increases, then progressively the concept of personal computing becomes more attractive because you can carry so much more with you."
The essential idea is to create a computer the size of a deck of cards (or an iPod), which you could always have with you, and which you would access through devices in the environment: displays on walls, keyboards left lying around, and so on. As Want told Brighthand, "[W]hen PDAs become inexpensive enough that they are left scattered around, in the same way we treat pens and paper today, you could pick up any of these devices and through the personal server it would, by association, become your device accessing your data."
My colleagues at the Institute have been talking about the coming age of ubiquitous displays for some time: as Kathi Vian puts it, we'll stop thinking of cheap flexible displays as "displays" (with their connotations of being expensive technologies that you use in specific locations) and start thinking of them as "design elements," which can appear anywhere. Imagine animated packaging that makes a store shelf look like Times Square. It sounds like Want is thinking along the same lines: in the future, you can just take the existence of displays for granted, and just focus on how to connect your personal server to them.
A technology like the personal server could do just what I need: help me rewind my reading, and find that quirky fact that seemed merely interesting, but may actually be significant. Yet there's a downside to being able to remember-- or more precisely, being able to retrieve-- everything in this way, as Ellen Ullman points out in a brilliant essay in the latest American Scholar. (Full disclosure: I'm on the American Scholar editorial board, and I think I might have recommended Ullman as a columnist.) For those who don't know her work, Ullman's Close to the Machine is one of the best meditations on programming ever written: she's a remarkably clear, vigorous writer. In the essay, she describes the experience of discovering, after buying a new laptop, that
The latest versions of Microsoft Windows make it easy to copy everything over to your new computer. Just plug in a cable... run a little "wizard" program that guides you step-by-step through the transfer... and soon millions of information bits will be streaming from your old machine to your new one.Thanks to Moore's Law, you never have to throw anything away-- for better or worse.
What is happening, essentially, is that each new computer has enough disk space to hold everything you've ever stored on all the computers you've ever owned in your life. The equivalent would be a new house that, every time you moved, would be so much larger than all your past houses that all the furniture you've ever purchased would follow you, indefinitely. Board-and-cinder-block bookshelves from freshman years... Danish modern coffee table from grad school... the rug you picked up at a garage sale after a tipsy brunch, that secondhand dining table bought hurriedly after the divorce-- all of it, no escaping it, the joy or humiliation of every decorating decision you've ever made, the occasion that brought each object into your life perpetually, unflinchingly present: the brutality of the everlasting....I felt I had to be careful. This was not like going through your papers to wind up with a carton you could store in the basement. Once the wizard program had waved all this over to the new machine, there it would all be, right in front of me.... At any moment, while you are whiling away time, maybe avoiding another task, or just daring yourself to think of the past, you might go "click," and then it all pops out at you: fresh, unyellowed, cruelly unchanged.
The fundamental problem is that personal memory doesn't work the way that computer memories do. Humans don't "retrieve" memories from storage so much as they reconstruct them: we remember things a little differently each time, and the meanings of events can subtly alter over time.
In some essential way, I had to forget all that. I needed the unreliable retellings of memory, the balm of revision. If we had to be confronted, daily, with the incontrovertible data proving the despair that attends the writing of books, how would anyone ever begin another? Or (for that matter), forever rereading anguished Letters for the Drawer [a folder of unsent letters], how would anyone ever make the breathtaking decision to remarry?
This is not to say that tools for remembering and calling up things we've read months or years ago wouldn't be useful (Ullman doesn't transfer the files, but she does keep the old computers); but they would have to be used very judiciously. The ability to creatively mis-remember your past, to reinterpret past events in the light of later knowledge and wisdom, is one of the things that makes us human. It's certainly something that makes us wiser humans. We've all had the experience of seeing extraordinarily difficult events as having laid the basis for later successes, or realizing that a silver cloud had a dark lining. It would be harder to do that if those memories were more accessible.
History is full of conflicts that are fed by ancient rivalries or wrongs; the ability to put the past aside, to forget and abandon old grievances, is essential to progress. It's also essential for people, as I concluded when I worked in the Buckminster Fuller papers. The Fuller papers consists of thousands of boxes of correspondence, notes, audio and video tapes, photographs and slides, and artifacts; the earliest material dated from the early 1900s, the latest from 1983, the year Fuller died. This wasn't just a repository: Fuller actually used it, sifting through it for ideas, reorganizing it, and reviewing it. (In the 1950s he sent to architecture schools extracts from his archive documenting his work-- I've seen them at MIT, Berkeley, and NC State-- and in the Fuller papers I found that he had changed the contents and order of the collection over time, highlighting new aspects of his work.) Fuller had a remarkable consistency in this thinking, and even in his speaking: while his lectures famously were all ad-libbed, he recycled stories from year to year, and was still using the same turns of phrase in the 1970s that he had in the early 1950s. At one point I developed a hypothesis that this gigantic repository served as a brake on Fuller's creativity, making it harder for him to explore new ideas and territory. By the 1950s, it consisted of hundreds of boxes; by the 1970, thousands-- a vast memory palace, but maybe also a great drag. I couldn't contain the heretical thought that if it had all gone up in flames at some point, Fuller might have started a new intellectual life, and achieved even more than he did.
How then do you remember everything and stay human? One thing to do is recognize the significance of what you're carrying around. I suspect we'll develop social rituals around getting personal servers (or their equivalent devices). Right now, my wife and I record my children's development and everyday activities: I photograph them, take short video clips, save art projects, etc.. We're their archivists, and we decide what's worth keeping and what's not. I can image a day when taking control of this process would be one of the things that marks your shift from childhood to adulthood: your parents and friends still take pictures of you, but you are now the one who is in control of your archive, and the repository goes from being a biography to being an autobiography, from being about you to being by you. With that responsibility would come the need to learn how to use the technology well-- particularly to learn how to put away some memories, to make them hard to access so you can move forward. Social navigation researchers have developed some interesting tools for changing the status of documents and information depending on how they're used; it may be possible to adapt those to make our own personal memories more manageable.
In the future the challenge may not be one of learning how to remember things; it may one of learning how to forget them. We already live in an age of "information pollution" (or so Jakob Nielsen recently declared), consisting of information that's pushed to us; the personal server could create another, possibly more pernicious, version of that problem.
Alex,
You get at the most important point in the Bucky bit; history and memory is about forgetting things as much as remembering things. Writing of print's power Robert Hooke wrote of the wealth of the man who had committed everything to print. But it was Nietzsche (spelling) who understood the centrality of forgetting--that's a major theme of the use and abuse of history. And a text you might want to look at. Let's face it; who would want a record of all our conversations? What an awful idea! Aren't there always some things you want to forget, to go away? And the joke is that the really painful things are always with us, just beneath the scabs and detours that memory provides. Haven't you noticed that you often move full circle in understanding a problem? I fear that if I had a perfect record of the past it would do more than inhibit the future, it would be the future. That's my fear of having a blog, that I would comment on things and have that record to reread. Sometimes you just have to jump into the text and write to the end. You wind up making a future that is all the more unpredictable. But I wander.
And as an aside, is the future where displays are simply fixtures one in which hand gestures lose their emotional value and valences?
Michael
Posted by: Michael Dennis | October 14, 2003 at 06:57 PM
Hey, you're the first comment! Way to go, Michael.
The idea of what to do with a lifetime of data has been running around my mind ever since I read about the personal server concept. The more I think about it, the more complex the sociology around it gets. Who inherits your data when you die? Arguably there will be nothing more personal, nothing more revealing about you, than this vast storehouse of data. Do you preserve it? Do the children fight over it? Should it be burned on a pyre?
This may sound like an odd question, but I think it's actually not a bad thought experiment.
Posted by: askpang | October 14, 2003 at 10:29 PM
This brings a whole new meaning to Identity Theft. It's one thing to have your credit card number stolen, or worse, your social security number, but can you imagine having everything stolen? Everything, with a capital 'EVERY'. That would be embarassing at the least, and catastrpohic at the worst. Even considering the fact that you could possibly make the data virtually unusable for anyone but yourself, just the thought of someone else walking around with your life in their pocket is more than a little disturbing.
Once that issue is either solved or ignored (whichever is your personal preference), how would one actually get our 'Life Story' into the device? It's one thing to record your child's first steps, words, and a few birthdays, but recording video manually thoughout your entire life would be a severely limiting task. Perhaps, the device would access any available recording device withing range and use it automatically. The security camera at the local Wal-Mart would record you shopping for new underwear, for example.
Technical issues aside, the data would portray quite a unique picture about us when we die. Orson Scott Card wrote a book called Speaker for the Dead, in which the lead character travels the galaxy 'Speaking' people's deaths. He would bring to public knowledge, all of the deceased persons motivations and experiences, including all of the things that that person would never have admitted to anyone while alive. The personal server would (could) do the same thing. Revealing who a particular person really was as oppsed to who they wanted everyone to believe they were. We have to remember that we rarely show our true selves to anyone except our most trusted (usually a spouse). Offering this information to everyone else would require a drastic change in how we, as a people, interact.
The sticky details are endless. Can the courts subpeona the data for use in prosecuting you in the event of a trial? The device would make a perfect eye-witness to everything you've (we've) ever done. Although I would imagine that no self-respecting theif would own one, most executives would, and it would be recording all of their insider trading acivities.
Obviously, we wouldn't want it running all the time. There are things that just shouldn't be remembered, let alone recorded. This shifts the gears significantly. If we are to be selective about what it records and what it ignores, then all of the above it moot. This is, I think, the only way we could possibly impliment such a device. We create a set of rules for the device to follow regarding what and when to record. E-mails are always saved, while you sitting in front of the TV watching a football game would be ignored.
I have to admit, it would be nice to have a personal 'Instant-Replay' of certain events in my life. It would bring new meaning to the ineveitable 'I guess you had to be there' idiom, I just don't know if it would be worth the possible trouble it could cause.
Posted by: Don Kirby | February 05, 2004 at 05:36 AM
I think that everyone seems to be missing an extremely important point about personal servers. This is ,I feel the effect that they would have on education is it not obvious that if we were able to record all our memories then all our classes as a child would be stored. With this in mind how useful would exam results be. As young children many of our exams are largely memory based (you are told something and if you recite that something in an exam word for word you pass) so surely this would lead to all children passing all exams. It is possible to think that they would be banned in exams and they probably would but only for a while. With them becoming such an important part of our lives it is foolish to think that they would be banned for long. I am aware that not all exams in our life are based entirely on memory but I believe that you could pass a degree as an undergraduate by memory alone. So then to take these ideas to an extreme how would an employer decide who to choose for a job, with most candidates having the same qualification and access to a perfectly preserved database of everything that they have ever been taught how can they justify a choice of one over another. I am aware that many people have what we call natural talent in certain fields but a lot of that can be attributed to a thirst for knowledge of a given subject. It would be easy to skim read around a subject and 'save' an entire text to our personal servers for later use this would surely make most people of equal intellect. An interesting point that follows from this is how could anybody then justify large salery differences. Now this is where it gets interesting if a government decided to give basic intelectual memory downloads to people in education (I am aware that we would still have to read or watch these downloads but I am working on the asumption that they are there for all of us to use if and when we want and also the asumption that we would all use them) then how can anyone justify earning more than anyone else is it not possible that a dustman could have the same stored intellect as a bank manager or lawyer the same as a cleaner etc. Surely then the only way to make the system fair woul be state pay for all jobs no matter how big or small!!!! (these are just thoughts around the subject that bring up interesting ideas and by no means indicate the authors political persuasions.)
Posted by: Toby Heppell | March 29, 2004 at 05:47 AM
I think that everyone seems to be missing an extremely important point about personal servers. This is ,I feel the effect that they would have on education is it not obvious that if we were able to record all our memories then all our classes as a child would be stored. With this in mind how useful would exam results be. As young children many of our exams are largely memory based (you are told something and if you recite that something in an exam word for word you pass) so surely this would lead to all children passing all exams. It is possible to think that they would be banned in exams and they probably would but only for a while. With them becoming such an important part of our lives it is foolish to think that they would be banned for long. I am aware that not all exams in our life are based entirely on memory but I believe that you could pass a degree as an undergraduate by memory alone. So then to take these ideas to an extreme how would an employer decide who to choose for a job, with most candidates having the same qualification and access to a perfectly preserved database of everything that they have ever been taught how can they justify a choice of one over another. I am aware that many people have what we call natural talent in certain fields but a lot of that can be attributed to a thirst for knowledge of a given subject. It would be easy to skim read around a subject and 'save' an entire text to our personal servers for later use this would surely make most people of equal intellect. An interesting point that follows from this is how could anybody then justify large salery differences. Now this is where it gets interesting if a government decided to give basic intelectual memory downloads to people in education (I am aware that we would still have to read or watch these downloads but I am working on the asumption that they are there for all of us to use if and when we want and also the asumption that we would all use them) then how can anyone justify earning more than anyone else is it not possible that a dustman could have the same stored intellect as a bank manager or lawyer the same as a cleaner etc. Surely then the only way to make the system fair woul be state pay for all jobs no matter how big or small!!!! (these are just thoughts around the subject that bring up interesting ideas and by no means indicate the authors political persuasions.)
Posted by: Toby Heppell | March 29, 2004 at 05:47 AM