Total Recall - C. Gordon Bell [48]
Deb Roy is the director of the Cognitive Machines group at the MIT Media Lab. In 2005, Roy and his wife, who is also a professor, had a son and decided to make all three of them into guinea pigs in a self-run experiment. They wired up their house so that virtually everything their son would hear and see from birth to age three would be recorded. Their equipment includes eleven omnidirectional, megapixel-resolution, color digital video cameras embedded in the ceilings of each room of the house—kitchen, dining room, living room, playroom, entrance, exercise room, three bedrooms, hallway, and bathroom. Fourteen ceiling-mounted microphones are placed for optimal coverage of CD-quality speech in all rooms. When there is no competing noise source, even whispered speech is clearly captured. A server sits in the basement storing all the recordings. They call it the Speechome.
The primary purpose was to get a complete record of their son’s language development—every cry, every coo, every “ga-gaga” and “da-da-da” ever uttered by the baby while at home, as well as every bit of language input to which the child is exposed. After three years they’ve collected 230,000 hours of raw data—a truly massive corpus. Compared to this corpus, previous studies are fragmentary at best. Who knows what key moments, previously unknown or overlooked, may be uncovered? The comprehensive nature of the Speechome record will enable observations that were completely impossible to make in the past. For the scientists studying language development, the Speechome approach expands their universe, just as the telescope has done for astronomers.
The size of the Speechome corpus will prove itself typical, if not indeed small, for future research projects. Total Recall will change how scientists learn. And each individual will come to have her own corpus of lifelong learning. Learning will change for all of us.
Technology is already changing what we take the time to learn. We no longer master the slide rule or even trust ourselves to evaluate a complex formula. Instead we turn to our calculators and spreadsheets, both of which we can get on cell phones these days. If you have children, you have probably heard the charge that spelling is an obsolete skill; who writes anything that matters without a spell checker? Even if those who vigorously defend spelling have to concede that it has become a less important skill—after all, as spelling and grammar checkers improve, the product of the poor speller has grown less and less distinct from that of the proficient speller.
Most of us are well along the path of outsourcing our brains to some form of e-memory. I no longer bother to learn telephone numbers; my cell phone remembers them for me. It knows eighteen hundred numbers, far more than I would ever hope to commit to memory, but quantity isn’t the issue; I can’t even be bothered to memorize the six numbers at my two homes and office. Likewise, there are many facts that need not be on the tip of the tongue as long as they are at your fingertip via your smartphone. The circumference of Earth, the speed of light, the year that Lincoln was assassinated, and Gauss’s electric flux law; each of these I once memorized in school. Now each takes about five seconds to look up on my smartphone. None seem quite so important to commit to memory anymore.
This is not to say you shouldn’t memorize facts or the correct spelling of words—it’s just that such memorization will never again be as important as it once was. And with Total Recall, the list of what is less important to memorize expands to cover everything you know.
Another way technology has already impacted learning is by changing the way we research things. When I was a student in the 1950s and had a paper to write, I’d walk to the library, hunt through the card catalogs and special abstract books, hike around the stacks grabbing items, and eventually sit in the library and make some notes in my notebook