Total Recall - C. Gordon Bell [4]
The era of Total Recall is dawning, whatever you personally choose to do with the technology. You may embrace full-scale “life logging,” and devote much effort to maximizing your e-memories, or you may prefer to record your activities only modestly and selectively, or even reject the whole idea and strive to leave as small a digital life-footprint as possible. People felt and continue to feel disdain for the Internet and even personal computers. Some of us don’t want a cell phone. No matter. Whether you are an early adopter, a late adopter, or a never-in-a-million-years nonadopter, society at large is on an inexorable path toward Total Recall technology and it is going to transform the world around you. The power of this transformation will be awesome.
THE E-MEMORY MACHINES
Total Recall is arriving in a blaze of innovation. There are ever more ways being developed and packaged for gathering information from the world and from our lives and putting it to myriad uses. People the world over are gabbing, texting, picture-taking, video-capturing, and Web-surfing on their cell phones. Phones and cameras can now send pictures automatically to a Web site where they can be grouped, culled, and annotated later. Parents take zillions of hours of video footage of their children with pocket-size cameras that dump directly into their home computers. Casual joggers can now analyze their performance at levels once reserved for world-class runners, tracking their metabolic burn rates and the lengths, times, and elevation profiles of their runs using small, affordable devices worn on their bodies. You can buy a bathroom scale that automatically sends your weight to an encrypted Web site where you can examine your progress (or lack thereof) in cold, hard, objective numbers. College students can time-sync their typed notes to their audio recording of a lecture, allowing them to relisten to part of the lecture later by clicking on one of their notes.
This cornucopia of information-gathering devices continues to grow in size and diversity while the devices themselves continue to grow smaller, cheaper, and more multifunctional. Meanwhile the cost of digital memory continues its exponential descent. When it comes to recording information, the technology stream is gushing toward ubiquity and saturation, toward a world in which price and convenience will no longer be factors when deciding what or whether to record. Indeed, we are headed toward a world where it will require a conscious decision (or a legal requirement) not to record a certain kind of information in a certain time or place—the exact reverse of how things are now. The technological and economic forces driving this trend are strong. Arguably, only a vast legal or political effort of social engineering can prevent it from effecting far-reaching changes in the way modern life is lived. That sort of catastrophic counterrevolution sounds far-fetched, but there are more realistic scenarios that I will discuss in Chapter 8.
E-memories will provide every person who embraces them with a different sense of their whole lives. It won’t erase human nature’s capacity for self-deception, but it will surely make the truth of what we did and what happened around us more available, clearer, and less obscured by nostalgic make-believe. The benefits will also be distinctly practical. In the chapters ahead I will describe these benefits in the workplace, to our health, and in our capacity for learning. Higher productivity, more vitality and longer life spans, deeper and wider knowledge of our world and ways to accomplish things in it—these are all wonderful practical consequences of this coming technological revolution. But there will also be psychological implications. Enhanced