Total Recall - C. Gordon Bell [89]
SHRINKING E-MEMORY MACHINES
The full spectrum of modern hardware is bringing us to the dawn of an era in which nearly every bit of information about your life can be captured and stored forever. This is not to diminish software. Nathan Myhrvold, the former chief technology officer at Microsoft who went on to found Intellectual Ventures, believes that only the software creator’s imagination limits what hardware can provide, and he is right. But if you can’t acquire it or store it, you won’t be computing it.
Throughout my adult life, hardware has been rapidly changing, and it continues to do so. Moore’s Law predicts that computers will be twice as powerful two years from now without changes in their size or price. Some time ago, I observed that there is another consequence of increased power and miniaturization: We get the same power at reduced size and cost. These cheaper, smaller versions of what we had before eventually get cheap enough and small enough to inspire the creation of an entirely new class of computers. A new class can be expected about every decade or so, with its own unique hardware-software environment, applications, user base, and vendors.
Eventually the power of your old PC finds its way into smaller devices, such as your digital camera, personal digital assistant, or cell phone. Looking ahead, it’s easy to see lots of multifunction pocket-size devices, with vast inexpensive storage for capturing everything you see and hear at higher and higher fidelity. The cell phones of the coming decade will have enough data storage and computing power to do some very powerful calculation and data mining on you and your environment. In fact, the smartphone I presently own is about a hundred times more powerful than the minicomputers I used to design—minicomputers that were shared among entire departments.
As noted earlier, the Total Recall revolution is being birthed on the strength of a few key devices: cell phones, digital cameras, and pocket-size GPS units. These devices have us snapping pictures, sharing media, and plugging into the networked world. Your PC is still extremely useful—it will not go away—but smaller, cheaper, more comfortable, and less obtrusive devices will provide the impetus for dramatic progress toward Total Recall.
In the next ten years our pocket-size devices will be accompanied by a host of even smaller cousins that will be able to compute, communicate, and, most significantly for our purposes, sense. There is no limit to the things it might be useful to sense in timely fashion. I have already discussed some of the wonderful prospects for health sensing, sensing your location, and automatically capturing the sounds and sights of your experiences.
Sensors on and in you will know not only about your body, but your environment: the location, temperature, humidity, sound levels, proximity to wireless devices, amount of light, and air quality.
Conference rooms and home offices are likely to end up with audio and video sensing, especially as teleconferencing continues to grow. This sensing enables the capture of individuals in organizational settings.
Every appliance will be sensing and logging. For instance, your dishwasher will measure the temperature of its hot water connection, while your washing machine will know the level of vibration during each load. These features will begin as diagnostic aids for repairing individual devices, but will find themselves being used in aggregate also. When you blow a fuse and wonder what caused the overload, you will check the appliance logs to find out everything turned on at the time. Eventually, your home’s e-memory will be part of your own Total Recall picture. Your time management software will be able to factor in how much laundry you do, and your