Total Recall - C. Gordon Bell [34]
When a new soldier rotates into an assignment, these improved, data- and media-rich reports will help him get up to speed, and will provide a new kind of resource to draw on. They will allow him to take over the memories of the assignment as well as the assignment itself. For example, if the new soldier sees a suspicious pickup truck, he can look at images from his predecessors’ reports to see if it is the same one. Intelligence officers can go back to extra footage not included in the report to check out other elements that may not have been considered important at the time—was that old man near the truck spotted in the vicinity the last time the truck was seen?
In addition to DARPA, I’ve also met with CIA contractors to discuss applications for Total Recall. After all, the station chief in Budapest needs to hand on his memories to his successor too. It’s another kind of tour of duty, where memories of faces, locations, vehicles, and so on can make life-or-death differences.
Total Recall is also important for the intelligence analysts at their desks back in the States. An interesting project called Glass Box records everything an analyst does at his PC workstation, literally recording a video of what is on his screen at all times, as well as tracking e-mail, opening documents, keyboard and mouse activity, Web surfing, instant messaging, and copy/paste events. The analyst can also make notes by talking or typing. Glass Box can be used to evaluate what research tools are most valuable to analysts, and possibly to detect traits of star analysts that could be taught to others.
Total Recall isn’t limited to helping soldiers and secret agents do their jobs and fill their assignments; Every line of work will benefit from Total Recall.
Jon Gilmore worked as a Sprint engineer for nine years, designing new cell sites in regions where coverage needed improvement. He drove all over northern California measuring signal strength. He also visited individual cell sites to improve their performance, adjusting their power levels or tweaking the direction of an antenna. On his last day at work, Jon handed over the key to his filing cabinet and a hard drive holding about fifty gigabytes of information.
“I used to travel with a compass, a GPS, and a digital camera,” says Jon. “I would verify the exact location of the site—often they were situated a little differently than what was in the records—and check the direction each beam was pointed in. I’d take digital pictures of the site, and the views from it to show the surrounding terrain.”
“I also made notes and took pictures about access to each site. For instance, we used to call one ‘ankle-biter lane.’ If you read my notes, you knew not to get out of your car between the first two gates, unless you wanted to be bitten by the little dog there.”
The engineer who took over for Jon also took over his e-memories.
YOUR REPUTATION
The Total Recall revolution will enable you to be the kind of employee or entrepreneur or small businessperson who gets more things accomplished, is more trustworthy, and more creative. The better you use Total Recall technology, the better your professional reputation will be.
Productivity gains will come from understanding one’s work habits better. With a detailed e-memory of what I do, my computer is my personal time-management consultant. I can look back over my activity logs and notice where I’ve spent too much time on low-priority projects, or took too little time at a key place, or burned up a surprising number of hours reading Internet news. Mary Czerwinski’s lab at Microsoft Research has come up with some brilliant visualizations of time spent at the computer based on keyboard and mouse activity associated with each running application. Most people are horrified at how often they are interrupted and at the time expended on overhead in their typical day. In the future, not only will we glean insight from such post hoc visualizations, we will program