Total Recall - C. Gordon Bell [3]
The coming world of Total Recall will be as dramatic a change in the coming generation as the digital age has been for the present generation. It will change the way we work and learn. It will unleash our creativity and improve our health. It will change our intimate relationships with loved ones both living and dead. It will, I believe, change what it means to be human.
Three streams of technology are coming together to make the world of Total Recall a reality. First, and perhaps most important, we are recording more and more of our lives digitally without even trying. Digital cameras, e-mail, cell phones, and personal digital assistants (PDAs) are the vanguard of technology that is generating an explosion of digital records of our daily lives. Digital sensing and recording will become ubiquitous. Second, this mountain of new personal digital records can now be stored more cheaply than can easily be imagined—for about two hundred dollars you can own enough memory to store everything you read, everything you hear, and ten pictures a day for your whole life. Third, technologies enabling you to search, analyze, and present all kinds of reports from such large mountains of data are being developed, with astonishing results. Google will by no means be the last extraordinarily successful company to be built on new search technologies. So, we live in a world with more digital memories, more space to store them, and better and better technology to recollect them. The world of Total Recall is inevitable for these three reasons.
With the same ease with which you can now search for just about any subject on the Web, you will be able to search your own electronic memory for any arbitrary item of knowledge you have ever encountered, any snippet of conversation to which you have ever been party, any document that has ever passed before your eyes, any place you have ever visited, any person you have ever met. You become the librarian, archivist, cartographer, and curator of your life.
The ability to recover particular events, names, faces, and words is just the most obvious benefit of the Total Recall revolution. Software will allow you to sort and sift through your digital memories to uncover patterns in your life you could never have gleaned with your unaided brain. Your work habits, your leisure habits, and your spending habits; your emotional response patterns in various situations and around certain people; the numerous subtle factors that affect your mental well-being and your physical health; and just about anything else you care to know about yourself can be chronicled, condensed, cross-correlated, and plotted out for you in useful and illuminating ways. Your goals and achievements for time management, budgeting, and balancing all aspects of your life, work, and health can be tracked through progress charts you set up for yourself. Having access to such detailed and personally relevant feedback is one of the most potent spurs to motivation and productivity to be had.
Now imagine a complete digital record of your life, a complete e-memory of your time on earth. Aristotle, Alexander the Great, Shakespeare, Mozart, Edison, and Einstein are dead but their ideas, their deeds, and their personalities have achieved a sort of immortality. Few aspire to be remembered along with history’s great characters, but by recording your life digitally you have the opportunity to bequeath your own ideas, deeds, and personality to posterity in a way never before possible. With such a body of information it will be possible to generate a virtual you even after you are dead. Your digital memories, along with the patterns of fossilized personality they contain, may