Total Recall - C. Gordon Bell [88]
CHAPTER 10
THE FUTURE
If the world follows my lead, Total Recall will be a very private matter. Encryption will be universal, e-memories will reside in Swiss data banks, and sharing will be careful and limited. I think the younger generation ought to eventually see their casual approach to privacy as a mistake and scale back their public disclosures. But maybe they won’t. Maybe my attitudes regarding privacy are headed toward extinction. There are those who say privacy is gone forever and good riddance to it.
If lifelogging becomes life-blogging, then the successors to Facebook and Twitter could have detailed records of every parameter of your life, with location, biometrics, sights, and sounds. Imagine for a moment that all memories are shared. One could then dream of data-mining all these memories, looking for collective good, much the way that my personal memories will be mined for my own good. There may even arise some kind of cyber communism that demands all of your information for the public good—for example your location, to help with city planning and emergency management. There could be an appeal to your own advantage: Just as Amazon.com and other Web sites track sales to predict items that you might want to buy, the collective cyber-mind might suggest many activities, places, and things that would be to your benefit or liking.
I don’t believe it. Embracing complete openness is like rescheduling Judgment Day for today. “What you did in secret will be shouted from the rooftops” might as well be the name of the next social networking Web site, echoing the words of Christ. But who can say for sure? I think that the future more than ten years from now is very hard, even impossible, to predict.
For one thing, it is simply hard to wrap one’s mind around the distant future. Passing on my e-memories to my grandchildren would be exciting enough—who can digest the idea of centuries ful of e-memories? You have thousands, if not millions, of ancestors from the past thousand years. What if you had all of their e-memories? Would one’s own family tree attract more attention than the History Channel? Would my family have a top-ten ancestor list, and a family highlight reel? Doubtless medical history would be pored over and different conditions identified in different branches. Genes would be compared to find ancestors similar to me, and lessons would be drawn from their lifestyle and health results. I can imagine drawing inspiration from an ancestor with similar interests to mine. I can also imagine angst over a tragic ancestor with some resemblance to me. I’d talk to his cyber twin: “But why did you want that?” “Did you realize . . . ?” If some great-great-grandsire had a gap in his e-memories, I might try to get access to the memories of his friends and relatives to try to piece together what he was keeping secrets about.
But with so many possible changes in society over a thousand years, my speculations may not be much better than a wild guess. And if culture is hard to predict very far ahead, I think technology is equally hard to predict in the long term. I don’t think anyone can predict technology more than a couple of decades ahead, because that implies knowledge of materials or phenomena that have yet to be discovered. Carver Mead, a Caltech computer scientist who coined the term Moore’s Law, posits an eleven-year rule: It takes eleven years to bring a high-tech product from the lab into existence. I feel comfortable predicting the progress of Total Recall about ten years out, based on technology that someone is already working on in some lab.
Next, I’m going to outline the technological context that will usher in Total Recall in the coming decade. There is a clear direction for computer hardware, sensors, and networking. Also, I see a trend in unified communications and storage. Total Recall will fuel demand for improved computer-user interfaces; it will also be key to enabling these interfaces to become more natural. Total Recall