Total Recall - C. Gordon Bell [92]
A natural user interface would be very helpful for Total Recall. As it turns out, NUIs really need Total Recall even more than Total Recall needs them. A NUI would be severely hobbled if it had no memory or knowledge of you. For the interaction to be really natural, I must be able to use my own idioms and nicknames. I must be able to ask about “my sister” or the “Web page I saw last week.”
A really natural user interface, just like a real personal assistant, would ask questions to clarify: “Did you mean your uncle Bob, or Bob at the office?” It would know the context of your conversation to make sense of what you say, just as a real person would. By tapping all of your e-memories, it would have even more context, knowing your preferences and your usual schedule. A natural user interface would know what terms and acronyms you use regularly, and which require more explanation. “Know your audience” is the first rule of public speaking. “Know the user” is the key to a natural man-machine interface, and Total Recall will finally make it possible.
EXTREME LONG-TERM PRESERVATION
I was asked to give the keynote address at the British Library’s Digital Lives Conference while writing this book. There was a fascinating discussion about how the library of the future will preserve e-memories rather than papers. But looming behind all the technical details is the really big question: Who gets in the British Library’s digital lifeboat and who gets left behind? However incredible the growth of storage continues to be, the library’s storage will remain finite, and after all, they aren’t interested in keeping the e-memories of everyone. They will continue to save only those of the most eminent politicians, authors, philosophers, and so on. And it is not clear to what “depth” they will be kept—is it better to have ten full lives or twenty lives at half-resolution?
This raises a question closer to home: Will my progeny one thousand years hence really be able to have a copy of all their ancestors’ lives? As I pointed out, each person could have millions of ancestors in that time span, so each individual’s having a full family tree of e-memories is out of the question. The cost of storage would have to be shared among all members of the family. We might even think of the cost being shared among the entire human family; each generation could share the cost of trying to preserve all previous generations.
The capacity of hard drives and other storage devices is growing. So, too, are the number of them being sold. In 1995, 89 million hard drives were sold. In 2008 more than 480 million were sold. Still, we cannot presume that the amount of storage each person can afford will endlessly grow, even at a modest rate. If population growth were fast enough, one could imagine each successive generation being able to carry forward the past. However, we may see negative population growth, as in some Western countries, and additional population growth in conditions of poverty will not support the retention of e-memories.
How to keep our ancestral memories after the end of exponential storage growth is an open problem. It may even be impossible. So, though it goes against my grain to say so, it may turn out that most lives need to have their storage cost reduced over time. Video, which takes the most space by far, stands to be trimmed down the most. This could mean deleting repetitious or boring parts, or it could mean reducing the resolution, for example converting high-definition video to YouTube quality. However, I am in realms beyond my ten-year time frame. Thousand-year preservation is a matter shrouded in uncertainty.
THE WISDOM OF SPORTSCASTERS
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