Total Recall - C. Gordon Bell [7]
Your smartphone plus whatever sensors and miscellaneous devices you wear and carry will all be linked together to form a personal digital memory collection-and-management system that will (if you choose) be able to record just about everything you see, hear, and do and keep it all in one big virtual collection in the cloud. The uses of such an archive are limitless.
Consider the fact that currently, nearly every financial transaction you make—making a deposit, withdrawing cash, paying with a credit or debit card—is registered electronically as a unique event. Every month when you open your statements you can see the trail you have left, which is geographical as well as financial, with entries like “01/07/08 32.60 **Australian Dollars 29.10 MOS CAFE SYDNEY NSW; 01/08/08 VIZZVOX INC WY 99.00; 01/12/08 MICROSOFT *ZUNE OFFICE SUPPLY STORE 00877-438-9863 WA 15.00” ; and so on.
Imagine extending this trend to all the recordable events in your life that you can imagine ever wanting to be able to recall or examine or contextualize at a later date: where you went, how you got there, who you met, what you did, what was said, how your vital signs varied, who you called, what you read, what you wrote, what you looked at, what pictures you took . . . all these things and more can be automatically recorded and saved, indexed, filed, and cross-referenced by time, location, and other natural linkages to make them easy to refind later and to sift through for patterns and trends.
While much of the technology for Total Recall is already available—e-mail, cell phone, camera, home videos, social-networking sites, photo- and video-management sites, and so on—these many pieces remain isolated and fragmented. They are not yet integrated by a single set of tools or unified under a common interface. The current e-memory ecosystem is relatively fraught with inconveniences: nonportable data formats, the need to keep on top of dozens of passwords and personal profiles, short battery life, and data fragmented across devices and applications. As these impediments disappear, led by the shift to cloud computing and the evolution of hardware, the e-memory experience will be transformed, and the technology of Total Recall will become a reality in most people’s lives.
FEAR
Such a massive change can be frightening. Won’t the government access all our e-memories and spy on us? Since George Orwell published his masterpiece novel 1984, the idea of government as Big Brother has loomed large in rational critiques of real government policies as well as in conspiracy theorist outcry. We like to use the term Little Brother. If Big Brother rules the authoritarian vision of a surveillance society, Little Brother rules the “democratized” vision. It is a society of omnipresent surveillance in which the recording equipment is not controlled by a single central authority, but by millions of individuals and private entities. Total Recall is perfectly consistent with social values behind the inspiration of the Internet, in which I’m proud to say I also played an early role.
Our culture will need to develop a whole new body of etiquette about who may record whom when and where. Our sense of privacy will continue to evolve, as it has since everyone knew everyone else’s business in the village life of agricultural economies. There is more to say on this subject and potential unintended consequences in the coming age of Total Recall. I’ll get to those issues in the third part of this book, after we look at the big impacts it will have on these key areas of life: the workplace, our health, our capacity