C. Gordon Bell & Jim Gemmell Total Recall (v5.0)

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.Those who shun recording will be less empowered than those who embrace it.You probably already spend a good deal of time each year filing away receipts, checkbooks, financial statements, photos, article clippings, and sentimental or souvenir items such as birthday cards and ticket stubs.You probably also take some time to label and annotate certain items to make them easier to later refind them and figure out what you kept them for.Total Recall just means storing and annotating things digitally instead of physically.It will not be any more time-intensive; in fact it will probably be less time-intensive, and the amount of information will be orders of magnitude larger.Digital records take less time to file, take up almost no space, and are easy to search.Pioneers like me might be manually filing records by scanning or snapping photos of them, typing or speaking quick notes about items that need explanation, even composing longer stories as I create the record.But soon so much of that will be as automated as your bank account statement.You won’t have to worry about forgetting someone’s name, face, or details of the conversations you have throughout each day.When you want to recall what someone said, you’ll be able to search for phrases or keywords.If the search brings up too many results, you’ll be able to narrow it down by other criteria: I remember it was said while I was on a trip to Atlanta.The person who said it was a woman, and I think she wore glasses.I’m sure it happened before I took my current job.Given enough criteria, even vague ones, a good search program will usually be able to find exactly what you are looking for.Imagine the ability to scan the past with the ease that would put Google to shame.Imagine how it could affect therapy sessions, friendly wagers, court testimony, lovers’ spats (of course, metajudgments like “It’s the way he said it” or “You didn’t really mean it” will never go away).Imagine how easy it will be to prove that repairs were done, that a salesman went back on his word, or that the dog really did eat your homework.Think of how nice it would be to have recordings of childhood conversations with your best friend, or a complete audio library of the millions of priceless things your kids said when they were toddlers.What were those first baby words, really?Just as important as the ability to search will be the ability to data-mine your e-memory archive, to find correlations and multidimensional patterns in your life experience.Your e-memory archive could give you insight into how you spend your time.Click a button and see a chart of how much exercise you have been doing in the last month, or year.Compare it to what you did when you were sixteen, or in the summer versus the winter.Or check how often you smile.Compare that to before you were married—or divorced.Total Recall can be a time-management gold mine, allowing you to define your goals or set standards for yourself and then track how they compare with your actual behavior.Maybe you are spending too much time managing your e-memories.Check it.With the right software you will be able to mine your digital memory archive for patterns and trends that you could never uncover on your own—graphing, charting, sorting, cross-sectioning, and testing for hidden correlations among all your bits.Imagine if you could bring into a single database all the pictures you take, all the places you visit, all the routes you take, all your notes and annotations, all your e-mails, along with room temperatures, weather conditions, diet, activity, whom you met with, your meeting cancellations, what you read, when you worked, what TV shows you watched, your mood swings, your flashes of inspiration.What would happen if you could take that whole slurry of life-history fragments and run it all through a powerful pattern-detection program? What kinds of patterns might you find?Digital memories can improve your health and extend your life.Equipped with new generations of personal sensing devices, you’ll be able to collect torrents of physiological data from yourself—alpha waves, dips in cortisol, temperature, pulse, sweating, and scores of other measures—in real time.And the health benefits of Total Recall aren’t limited to those with known health risks.Whether it’s sticking to your exercise plan, watching your weight, battling insomnia, managing allergies, tracking down the causes of a recurring rash, gaining control of your stress and anxiety responses, or training your mind to focus better, your best and most often used tool is going to be an easily and totally recallable continuous physiological e-memory.TOTAL RECALLI hate to lose my memories.I want Total Recall.This isn’t a pipe dream.I know that three streams of technology advancement—recording, storage, and sophisticated recall—have already launched the beginning of the Total Recall era.It is absolutely clear that by 2020 these streams of technology will have matured to give the complete Total Recall experience.I don’t work on anything unless I see a practical payoff.I got started in this by wanting to get rid of all the paper in my life.Then I wanted better recall; then a better story to leave to my grandchildren.Soon I became aware of potential benefits for my health, my studies, and even a sense of psychological well-being from decluttering both my physical space and my brain.As time passes, I become more and more excited about the benefits of Total Recall.As you read on about Total Recall, I’ll tell you more about my own story, and I’ll elaborate on the incredible gains that Total Recall will supply across so many areas of life.In the last section of the book, I’ll discuss how to put these ideas into practice, and explain how you can stop losing your mind and get started creating your own e-memories.CHAPTER 2MYLIFEBITSMy own quest for Total Recall began in 1998 while I was working as a researcher at Microsoft.I didn’t start out thinking of Total Recall.As usual, I was being pragmatic and looking for things to make my own life better.A colleague, Raj Reddy, asked me if he could digitize the books I had written and put them on the Web as part of his Million Books Project.“Sure,” I told him, “Microsoft has a lot of lawyers [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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