The Total Recall revolution
is inevitable. It will change what it means to be human
It has already
begun.
What if you could
remember everything? Soon, if you choose, you will be able to conveniently and
affordably record your whole life in minute detail. You would have Total Recall. Authors Gordon Bell and
Jim Gemmell draw on experience from their MyLifeBits project at Microsoft
Research to explain the benefits to come from an earth-shaking and inevitable
increase in electronic memories. In 1998 they began using Bell, a luminary in
the computer world, as a test case, attempting to digitally record as much of
his life as possible. Photos, letters, and memorabilia were scanned. Everything
he did on his computer was captured. He wore an automatic camera, an arm-strap
that logged his bio-metrics, and began recording telephone calls. This
experiment, and the system created to support it, put them at the center of a
movement studying the creation and enjoyment of e-memories.
Since then the three
streams of technology feeding the Total Recall revolution—digital recording,
digital storage, and digital search—have become gushing torrents. We are capturing
so much of our lives now, be it on the date stamped photos we take with our
smart phones or in the continuous records we have of our emails, instant
messages, and tweets—not to mention the GPS tracking of our movements many cars
and smart phones do automatically. We are storing what we capture either out
there in the “cloud” of services such as Facebook or on our very own
increasingly massive and cheap hard drives. But the critical technology, and
perhaps least understood, is our magical new ability to find the information we
want in the mountain of data that is our past. And not just Google it, but data
mine it so that, say, we can chart how much exercise we have been doing in the
last four weeks in comparison with what we did four years ago. In health,
education, work life, and our personal lives, the Total Recall revolution is
going to change everything. As Bell and Gemmell show, it has already begun.
Total Recall provides a glimpse of the near future.
Imagine heart monitors woven into your clothes and tiny wearable audio and
visual recorders automatically capturing what you see and hear. Imagine being
able to summon up the e-memories of your great grandfather and his avatar
giving you advice about whether or not to go to college, accept that job offer,
or get married. The range of potential insights is truly awesome. But Bell and
Gemmell also show how you can begin to take better advantage of this new
technology right now. From how to navigate the serious questions of privacy and
serious problem of application compatibility to what kind of startups Bell is
willing to invest in and which scanner he prefers, this is a book about a
turning point in human knowledge as well as an immediate and practical guide.
Total Recall is a
technological revolution that will accomplish nothing less than a
transformation in the way humans think about the meaning of their lives.
Download and start listening now!