Total Recall - C. Gordon Bell [31]
Total Recall will make it possible to deal with a prolific and even hectic work pace, far above our current expectations—and still remain sane. It will help make you more productive, whether you are a busy traveling salesperson or a parent frantically chauf feuring your kids between school and activities.
Being essentially paperless will be a big factor in this improvement. Instead of archaeological digging, a few keystrokes and mouse clicks will get what you need. Paperless offices are far more pleasant, and somehow calming.
Total Recall will also give everyone an incredible sense of freedom. Travel anywhere, anytime, and maintain complete access to every detail concerning your enterprise. I’ve experienced a taste of these benefits already, but work lives in the coming generation will become amazingly more powerful generators of prosperity and satisfaction.
THE NEW JOB
When you start at a new job, it can take a while to get up to speed and learn the ropes. How intensive and how crucial this process is varies widely. It might not be too big a deal in the case of, say, a new waitress at a theme café, who may take a few weeks to figure out what the style of the place calls for and the predictable orders of various regular patrons. At the other extreme it may have enormous importance, such as when a new president takes the helm of the world’s mightiest nation.
I don’t recommend this movie for students of political science, but in National Treasure 2 there is a presidential “book of secrets.” The book supposedly contains secrets for a president’s eyes only, and is passed on to each new occupant of the White House. While no such book actually exists, at least as far as I know, there is clearly a vast body of knowledge that must pass from one POTUS to the next. The news media loves to run stories on the recently elected politician who doesn’t know X concerning his or her new duties. Just think of the enormous body of knowledge that an aspiring president is expected to have on the tip of the tongue.
In between the president and the waitress are a million other jobs that have memories to pass on. Total Recall will break new ground in the effectiveness of transferring memories from one occupant of a position to the next.
In order to tolerate staff turnover, many large organizations are structured around clearly defined functions and operating procedures for each member of the team. There is no better example than the military, whose constant movement of personnel demands an extremely modular approach at all levels of its command structure. Soldiers and officers routinely rotate in and out of positions on their tours of duty, and even homeland bases and training facilities regularly shuffle their staff. Whether you are a new base commander, quartermaster, or front-line soldier, you are expected to drop into a position and be effective the moment your boots hit the ground. National defense, with such well-defined roles, is a fertile area for the application of Total Recall.
In early 2003, program director Doug Gage and some of his colleagues from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) came out to San Francisco to meet with Jim Gemmell and me. They were interested in MyLifeBits as a model for a research program they were hatching called LifeLog. They had already held a LifeLog workshop and decided they were interested in a system that “captures, stores, and makes accessible the flow of one person’s experience in and interactions with the world” and that “can be applied to a wide spectrum of associate/assistant systems to allow the system to ‘understand’ the user’s state based on knowledge of the user’s history (timeline, routines, habits, etc.), in order to make the user more effective in a wide