Total Recall - C. Gordon Bell [12]
TOTAL RECALL
I hate to lose my memories. I want Total Recall.
This isn’t a pipe dream. I know that three streams of technology advancement—recording, storage, and sophisticated recall—have already launched the beginning of the Total Recall era. It is absolutely clear that by 2020 these streams of technology will have matured to give the complete Total Recall experience.
I don’t work on anything unless I see a practical payoff. I got started in this by wanting to get rid of all the paper in my life. Then I wanted better recall; then a better story to leave to my grandchildren. Soon I became aware of potential benefits for my health, my studies, and even a sense of psychological well-being from decluttering both my physical space and my brain. As time passes, I become more and more excited about the benefits of Total Recall.
As you read on about Total Recall, I’ll tell you more about my own story, and I’ll elaborate on the incredible gains that Total Recall will supply across so many areas of life. In the last section of the book, I’ll discuss how to put these ideas into practice, and explain how you can stop losing your mind and get started creating your own e-memories.
CHAPTER 2
MYLIFEBITS
My own quest for Total Recall began in 1998 while I was working as a researcher at Microsoft. I didn’t start out thinking of Total Recall. As usual, I was being pragmatic and looking for things to make my own life better. A colleague, Raj Reddy, asked me if he could digitize the books I had written and put them on the Web as part of his Million Books Project.
“Sure,” I told him, “Microsoft has a lot of lawyers. They should be able to get me out of any trouble that comes from copyrights.”
Seeing those books become digital felt good, and encouraged me to try some more scanning. I did the scanning myself just to see how to do it and whether it was interesting and useful. I scanned a pile of correspondence, patents, and around a hundred articles. I became even more upbeat, and set my sights on scanning all of my papers and notebooks. I saw it would declutter my office, and allow me to work from home or anywhere I happened to be. I could be an efficient, paperless teleworker.
Then I thought: Why stop there? With all those cheap terabytes of storage coming down the pipe, why not just keep everything? Not only books and papers and e-mails, but slide presentations, product brochures, health records, interviews, photos, songs, movies—all the information of my life.
It wasn’t as if no one had thought of this before. Bill Gates wrote in his 1995 book, The Road Ahead, “Someday we’ll be able to record everything we see and hear.” Clearly, that someday will come because we’ll be able to make practical use of all those e-memories. That someday is going to be in the middle of someone’s life. Why not mine? Why not now? But how? How could one person speed the arrival of the era of Total Recall? I became intrigued with the idea of keeping everything.
There is a strong social prejudice against this very simple idea. Keeping everything is like the eighth deadly sin. You’ll become a packrat, a horder, obsessed with your past. You shouldn’t look back. You need to clear out your attic and throw stuff away. And in a nondigital world, that kind of thinking made some sense. But in a digital world, with time and cost barriers melting away before our eyes, things have changed. Keeping everything doesn’t mean you have to spend all your time looking after masses of paper and stuff. Don’t throw it away, digitize it.
I especially wanted to rid myself of my filing cabinets and the countless banker boxes