Living With Your Past
A Perfect Memory?
Politics & Ideas
This is about MyLifeBits, and whether we really need it. It's another new technology which may be coming your way from Microsoft in the medium term future; or possibly not them, but someone else. The point is, whoever does it, it's likely to appear in one form or another. What it's all about is satisfying the urge to record everything. That is, your whole life - every picture, speech, phone call, letter/email... everything that can be recorded. It's driven by the fact that storage is getting cheaper and cheaper, to the point where hard drives with a capacity in the region of hundreds of gigabytes are almost here, and in the thousands, just around the corner. As I understand it, MyLifeBits will involve software up to the demanding task of ordering it all so that you can find whatever you want. It's the electronic version of the cardboard boxes in your attic, except that you'll never lose anything.
This
man here (left) is Gordon Bell. He's the main
man behind the project, and he's been starting in a practical way by
converting every record he can lay his hand on, into digital form. When
he's done, he'll be able to, say, type in "1 April 2000",
and straightaway see every mail, image, sound file, video film etc.
created on that day. And as we begin to possess more and more generators
of data, so we'll be leaving more and more of an electronic trail behind
us.
He and his team have calculated that by 2010 we are likely to be seeing terabyte-sized hard disks appearing on our computer; and as hard disk capacity increases, so the price of it all will continue to plunge. Their ballpark figures indicate that a terabyte could swallow up 60+ years' worth of personal data, composed as follows:-
100
e-mail messages per day;
100 Web pages viewed per day;
5 scanned pages per day;
1 book every 10 days;
10 photos per day;
10 hours of sound per day;
and 1 CD per week.
Of course you'll raise a host of questions about this. For a start, as individuals we will each of us amass quite different sorts of data. Me, I don't send and receive 100 emails a day (even including spam (just hope that is still true in a few months' time)), but I listen to more than 1 CD a week. Not the point. I accept the premise, that in ten years' time it may indeed be feasible to put a record of a great deal of our lives on our personal home computer; and the software - MyLifeBits or something else - will be available to access any of it in any way we desire.
If you follow any of the links below, you'll find that the doubts focus on privacy and security, and I share those doubts... up to a point. The whole thing presupposes a certain kind of wired-up lifestyle, doesn't it? And let's make a comparison, with the familiar and time-honoured tradition of giving and receiving fancy new desk diaries at Christmas, sometimes with the intention of keeping a brilliant journal, beautiful and fascinating journal; how many are kept up for more than a few weeks? I think only a dedicated few will make the necessary household and working arrangements to gather their personal data automatically. Call me cynical, but if the recording is left to human beings, it'll be patchy at best.
Whatever.
There's another issue, which for all the other commentators I've listened to, is a positive argument for the MyLifeBits development, and that's the historical one. We live in an age when, in the blink of an eye, we have ceased to leave paper records behind us. Few write diaries or journals, few write personal letters, and we are on the verge of being much more selective about our picture records thanks to digital photography. On top of that, we move around so much more than we used to that the boxes of junk - the accretions of our lives - that once happily took on layers of dust in boxrooms and attics, are now all too disposable.
There are issues like this which affect professional spheres as well. If you want to research a 19th or 20th Century novelist, for instance, you could well have a cache of letters and early drafts to delve into. Now, you will, hopefully, have his or her emails, and final publications; but where, amongst other things, are those early drafts? So, with MyLifebits technology, we could equal or rather surpass, our ability to examine the lives of significant people. And we could also make a great leap forward in our ability to keep alive the memory of our parents and ancestors. The urge is certainly there, as evidenced by the internet-powered growth in interest in genealogy.
And that's
where I'd like to voice a small quiet reservation.
I've passed a time of my life in which I have had to go through the
leavings of people I knew. I have much of it with me still. Books, letters,
documents, pictures; some items of clothing, all sorts of bric-a-brac.
I have had to move some of it several times. And each time I move it
from one drawer to another, from one box to another, it loses a bit
of its context. I'm aware of it, just as my memories of those relatives thin and fade. You'd think I should
be asking for full and permanent records, wouldn't you? Especially since
I myself have looked into my genealogy, sometimes enjoying explanations
of small mysteries and new stories, but more often finding that there
are things I will never find the answer to. About my own parents, and
others equally close.
But nostalgia can be cloying. I think there's a reason why people forget things, beyond simple biological inefficiency. I think we have to do a constant sorting of our memories; as we grow older there's too much to be able to manage all of it. A perfect memory must be a heavy yoke. Things which are interesting or important enough, tend to gain a record somewhere. And if they don't... well, it happens. If the meaning of our culture and society is defined by our past history, well, that's a certain history as it has been recorded. It's a history that misses out much, but it's the history we have. Yes, it could be different and more accurate; but does that matter very much? If we're honest, the way we frame our own lives to ourselves is a fiction. Perhaps, no matter how perfect our memory, that must always be true.
A final truth is death. Technology is unlikely to ever change that essential fact of human life. Gently letting people and events fade into the past is probably vital to how we handle our lives. That doesn't mean we should forget our forbears; just that their memory is best preserved by the active memory we possess between our ears, and by intelligent and wise imagination. MyLifeBits could perversely overpower our ability to do all that by its sheer undiscriminating completeness. Perfect memory lies in wisdom, not in terabytes. Why, really, would most of us want to be able to hang on to our pasts in such massive detail?
9 October 2003
Links
Some,
not very extensive, background to the project. If you do some searching
you may find some technical articles. Current thinking seems to be that
a simple early form of the software may find its way into the next version-but-one
of Windows (codenamed 'Longhorn' at the moment).
The
only vaguely alternative article I found, at ZDNet. David Coursey covers most of the various issues but
is no more than equivocal about most of them. His principal doubts relate
to the question of privacy.
PS
I've kept this old piece because I still can't understand why everybody thinks that recording everything is a good thing. I'd like to note that now (2008) they're already fitting 1 terabyte drives into computers, and sizes double that exist. The snag of course is that the size of things we 'want' to store has also gone up. It won't be long before people will regularly copy High Definition video clips into their machines. That list above is laughable in all sorts of ways; eg. see how there's no mention of mp3s. But quibbling about that would be to miss the point. MyLifeBits may or may not appear as such, but there's plenty of evidence that in a variety of ways, eg. in social networking sites, that people are indeed beginnning to record everything they do.