Total Recall - C. Gordon Bell [8]
HOW DID WE GET HERE?
The arc of human development from the Stone Age through the present can be seen as an ongoing quest for Total Recall. One thing that has defined our progress as the preeminent species on the planet has been our ability to develop better and better systems of memory.
Our greatest innovation was language, a unique system for representing, storing, and sharing knowledge. Language made us into the first and only truly cultural animal, able to share both highly specific and powerfully abstract bits of knowledge across societies and down through generations.
The next great turning point in human development was the invention of writing, which it became necessary to invent as the needs of record keeping in agrarian city-states outstripped the limits of naked memory. Thanks to writing, human knowledge snow-balled over just a few thousand years and brought us most recently into the Information Age. Around the middle of the last century the digital computer joined our mnemonic arsenal and rapidly precipitated another epochal change in how we manage our knowledge. A mere generation ago, the amassing of information was so expensive that a world of Total Recall could be no more than a wild science-fiction dream.
But themes of Total Recall have been explored in science fiction for decades.
In Hominids, Robert J. Sawyer imagines the citizen of the future sporting a body-implanted “companion” computer that transmits information about his or her location, as well as three-dimensional images of exactly what he or she is doing, to an “alibi archive.” The archive protects against false accusations.
In The Truth Machine, James Halperin describes a world where not only is recording common, but everyone testifies using a perfect lie detector. Crime is drastically reduced. But when people want to talk candidly in a free and open discussion, they must turn off their recording equipment.
The 2004 movie The Final Cut depicts a world where people pay to have their babies’ brains implanted with memory chips, called Zoes, that record everything those children see and hear throughout their lives. When the person dies, the chip is removed and a professional “cutter”—in this case a somber Robin Williams—goes through the chip’s footage to edit his or her life down to a (flattering) feature-length movie called a Rememory, which is played for friends and family at the memorial. Cutters can make “saints out of criminals,” as Williams’s character does with the life of a child abuser. The movie also shows protesters with placards demanding “the right to forget” and darkly depicts the lengths to which some people might be willing to go to get their hands on the private life recordings of a political enemy.
Another common theme of sci fi is digital immortality, whereby a person’s lifetime of experience, knowledge, and personality are simulated by a computer. In the Superman movies, the Fortress of Solitude can create an on-screen likeness of Superman’s wise and stately father, Jor-El, which is able to answer questions about Kryp tonian history, technology, and culture. In the British TV sitcom Red Dwarf the last human in the universe, David Lister, is forced to endure the company of a hologramatic simulation of his insufferable prat of an ex-crewmate, Arnold Rimmer. And in the American TV espionage series La Femme Nikita, the character Madeline is virtually resurrected in a similar fashion. As the character Quinn explains: “Madeline’s psychological and analytical profiles were extensively documented. It was a question of merging them with [an] artificial intelligence program.” Thus the steely intelligence director—or at least, the benefit of her lifetime of experience—continues to aid the living after her death.
Science fiction can be fun