Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything [Roughcut]

Gordon Bell (Author), Jim Gemmell (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 17, 2009 | ISBN-10: 0525951342 | ISBN-13: 978-0525951346

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--and location--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. "What would happen if we could instantly access all the information we were exposed to throughout our lives?" -Bill Gates, from the Foreword

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. At Microsoft, computer science pioneer Bell has worked with senior researcher Gemmell for years on a project called True Recall, which will allow people to create a "digital diary or e-memory continuously," something they predict will "change what it means to be human" as fundamentally as language development and the invention of writing. Based upon further development and integration of three already-extant technology streams (digital recording devices, memory storage and search engines), the authors have worked toward this "third step" in the development of human memory for a decade and a half. A number of issues will need to be addressed, including privacy; the authors distinguish between being a "life logger," with privately stored digital records, and a "life blogger," whose web posts are accessible to others (like friends or coworkers). Bell and Gemmell outline the tests they've run since 2001, scanning and then cataloguing for retrieval a mass of personal data (documents, photographs, books and articles, web pages visited, instant messages, telephone calls) and wearing miniature cameras that sense light shifts and take automatic photographs. Readers will be wondering about the consequences of "recalling everything you once knew" long after they put down this fascinating text, of particular interest to techies, but clearly written for general readers.

Review

"I am not sure whether recording everything we see, hear and do is the landfill or landscape of our lives, because thoughts and memories are their own reality. But I am sure that Total Recall is a must read due to its inevitability, seminal nature and clairvoyant authors." -Nicholas Negroponte, author of Being Digital

"Gordon Bell is one of the great visionaries in the computer industry. In Total Recall he paints a picture of a world where computing is far more personal than anything we have seen so far, where digital memory appliances supplement the human mind and store all the details of your life. Like much of Gordon's work it is a characteristically bold and exciting vision of computing. He takes us to a future which is just around the corner, but which would be hard to glimpse without him."
-Nathan Myhrvold, co-founder of Intellectual Ventures

"For decades, the tech world has been going gaga for "Moore's Law", which describes how much faster and more powerful personal electronics becomes over time, but in the last decade, most of the really big freakouts have been as a result of the explosion in our ability to capture and store data... What happens when being alive means being in record mode, for everybody? It's a change that is at once astonishing and imminent. Gordon and Jim are at the center of this kind of work, and just the guys to write the book."
-Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody

"Total Recall does a marvelous job of exploring first- hand the implications of storing our entire lives digitally. And just in time! -- the technology is already here and will be ubiquitous before we know it."
-Guy L. Tribble, MD, PhD, Vice President of Software Technology, Apple Inc.

"Economists, along with everyone else, will be astounded by the wide ranging social and personal benefits of Total Recall digital technology."
-Tyler Cowen, author of Create Your Own Economy

"As you warm to the ideas expressed in Total Recall, you find yourself reaching for your digital camera to record the moment just gone by."
-Donna Dubinsky, CEO of Numenta, co-founder of Palm and Handspring

"Wow! Thanks for this book. I've been fascinated by MyLifeBits for years; it's certainly inspired our thinking at Evernote."
-Phil Libin, CEO, Evernote

"Extraordinarily prescient but also entertaining...Total Recall is of paramount importance in the new, increasingly paperless world."
-Leslie Berlowitz, Executive Director of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences

"Total Recall offers a prescient view of the powerful use of today's information tomorrow. Gordon provides provocative insights, entertaining stories, and fundamental advancements in recall enabled by tools readily available today that immediately enhance the capture, access and sharing of numerous forms of information."
-Jim Marggraff, Founder, CEO and Chairman of Livescribe, Inc.

"Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell paint a vivid and personal picture of a revolution that is already in progress, a revolution that will transform our future by making our past transparent. Clear, detailed, and permanent knowledge of ourselves and others will change the fiber of our lives and societies, pervasively, from meal planning to constitutional law. If we are blind to the implications, we'll be trying to solve the wrong problems with obsolete tools. Total Recall will open eyes, and the more, the better."
-Dr. K. Eric Drexler, author of Engines of Creation

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Roughcut: 304 pages
• Publisher: Dutton Adult (September 17, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0525951342
• ISBN-13: 978-0525951346
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.4 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #104,946 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #10 in Books > Computers & Technology > Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence > Neural Networks
  • #53 in Books > Medical Books > Basic Sciences > Biotechnology
  • #62 in Books > Computers & Technology > Computer Science > Human-Computer Interaction

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

72 of 85 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars EVERYTHING, EVERYWHERE, ALL THE TIME, October 1, 2009

By 

Bob Blum (California, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything (Roughcut)

On his website, The Technium, Kevin Kelly (of Wired and Whole Earth fame)
writes about "What Technology Wants."
Here's what IT wants - "Everything, Everywhere, All the Time."

In IT's strive toward omniscience, it's clear that the next key piece is
Total Recall of all personal, individual memories.
Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell lay out precisely how and why that will happen.

I've been in the memory business for over 40 years:
first as a student of neurobiology at MIT, then as an AI researcher at Stanford,
and finally as a physician. (Search "Bob Blum" for my essays on
machine consciousness and other Big Questions.)

I had heard of Gordon Bell for decades, but had never met him
until recently when I heard Gordon and Jim present this work
at the (Xerox) PARC Forum. (That video is now on the PARC Forum archive).
That prompted me to buy the book.

Despite being age 75, Gordon is a lively, energetic spirit
who readily deflected my public query/position ,
"don't neuroscientists consider forgetting to be crucial
as a means of increasing memory relevance?"
(My concern then and still is on maintaining high signal to noise ratio -
quieting the mind to achieve the zen of pure signal.)

Young Jim Gemmell is also bright and engaging.
Although I'm guessing that Jim contributed half of the leg work,
the book is presented as a first person account of Gordon's 75 year life.
The work is a delightful combination of the future of personal data capture
as well as a recounting of their experiences with MyLifeBits, a system implementation.
That work was presented in Scientific American in March 2007 online - qv.)

Gordon has ridden the ascendancy of IT from prebirth
(the family business was Bell Electric), through his student days at MIT,
through his years as principal architect of the DEC System PDP and VAX computers
(that ruled the IT world for a decade), and finally to his current position
as eminence grise at Microsoft.

This book was a great stroll down memory lane.
I love visiting the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California.
I had forgotten that this wonderful museum was made possible by Gordon Bell.
He describes his efforts at collecting the oral histories that went into the museum,
and how much easier it would have been with Total Recall.
Imagine having every conversation of Charles Babbage, Thomas Watson,
John Von Neumann, and Alan Turing.)

Now, here's their main point - as you live your life, COLLECT EVERYTHING:
every visual field, every conversation, every location, every accessible bodily function -
not merely every email and web page. They describe a panoply of present and future sensors
that will perhaps make it effortless: micro video cams, physiologic monitors, gps,etc.

Ok, I've got 40 physical file drawers (I'm a fellow packrat),
but that proposition raises hackles even with me as it must with every reader.
Really? Isn't that endlessly time-consuming and distracting?
(They say "no" - I say "maybe.") "Let the system do all the work," they say,
silently collecting all you see, hear, do, and are.
Then, at least, it's all potentially available, if and when you want to retrieve it.
(Record your every moment from birth, then these e-memories will be available to
your great grandchildren, your biographer, and your therapist.)

Their goal is identical to Google's:
index and make readily available every single experience.
(They describe MIT researcher Deb Roy's 24 by 7 real-time video capture
of every instant in the life of his new born baby for three years:
bizarre perhaps but priceless for students of language.)

Health, work, education, travel, personal life are all grist for Total Recall.
The health care piece especially resonated with me, since I had developed
a system at Stanford that discovered medical knowledge from stored personal data.
They correctly describe the huge importance that will accrue to each of us
as we gather data on our day to day health and habits.
Refrigerator to Gordon - "What? No vegetables? Just Ice Cream?!"
Computer to Bob - "You've sat too long. Time to get up and bike."

Gordon describes his several episodes of severe coronary disease including cardiac arrest.
Heart disease, like most diseases, is brought on one day at a time over a lifetime.
The remedy is self observation and performance monitoring. All our habits need to be recorded.
We are our own best doctors. Not only is the data personally essential,
but it's a great epidemiologic resource. When a close friend died of cancer,
it was tragic that the causative factors had not been captured.
(We are probably swimming in a sea of unidentified carcinogens.)

One thinks of the many potential hazards of collecting data this intimate:
identity theft, denial of insurance coverage, blackmail, and cognitive clutter.
They discuss all of the many pitfalls and present some novel solutions,
eg the self-destructing Swiss Data Bank. They do NOT advocate making your data public.

I had expected (and got) a thorough discussion of their experiences with
personal data capture. But, what a pleasant, upside surprise was the engaging story of
their use by Gordon as he built the Computer Museum, dealt with his heart attacks,
dealt with a poignant incident (the mysterious disappearance/death of his boss,
superstar computer scientist Jim Gray), his deals with dozens of start-ups and
entrepreneurial projects, or his on-going effort at age 75 to build an immortal version
of himself that may be able to grow and learn after his body has been recycled!
(Want to get rich? The book is filled with great ideas for entrepreneurs - untapped gold!)

Yes. 99% of life is banal, but, as they say,
"the palest ink is better than the best memory,"so RECORD IT ALL.
I award the book a mere 4 stars, only because it is not "War and Peace."
But, if you work with computers and are interested in the future, this book is for you.

"Everything, Everywhere, All the time" is inevitable, at least for some of us.

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Easy read, practical -- insights from early participants, December 20, 2009

By 

William Yarberry "Bill Yarberry" (kingwood, tx United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything (Roughcut)

There are many branches of the tree of accelerating technology. Bell and Gemmell's book focuses on the current and future effects of information retention and, more importantly, information retrieval. They range from practical advice -- make scanned bills PDF searchable -- to future scenarios where so much information has been retained that we can "talk" with our long dead great grandparents (via artificial bots made smart by massive knowledge of the subject). The book is somewhat happhazardly organized but I gave it a five star anyway because of the insights and the fact that Bell went through the process of recording his life, using prototype software. Someone who has "done it" speaks with more authority than an armchair quarterback. After reading the book, I thought ... of course -- explained in the context of massive increases in storage, networking and computing power, it all makes sense. Bell and Gemmell are relatively conservative in their predictions. They touch on some of the security issues but do not dwell on them. It is probably just as well, since the trend to increasing storage of events is inevitable and security will just have to be worked out. How many business meetings have I attended where ten people have been introduced in about ten seconds? A universal recall device would come in pretty handy.

Bill Yarberry, Houston, Texas

29 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Total Recall doesn't add up, February 8, 2010

By 

Lee Frank (Tucson AZ) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything (Roughcut)

Remember when everyone at concerts held up their lighters? Now it's cell phones -- taking pictures. This is the basic problem with "Total Recall": We are far better at capturing moments than we are at preserving them. Heck, we're better at preserving them than we are at organizing them so that later we can find what we want. This is truer now that it's all-digital than it was when it was all-shoebox. Clearly, our intentions are better than our methods.

Like you, I'm being continually supplied with free software to help me find all the photos on my machine. But when the pile is big enough (and mine, like yours, certainly is), no amount of brute force searching is more useful than simple organizing. When will software be able to do that for me?

Therefore, the real proposition of "Total Recall" is brute force combined with AI. Gordon Bell says we have the technology now to save everything, so the real challenge is developing truly helpful AI. His ideas are completely dependent on this happening in the near term. Others, myself included, are far more skeptical. And without useful AI, "Total Recall" is just another impractical utopian ideal.

I'm sure Gordon Bell is a better engineer than I am, and I know he's a better entrepreneur. But as to his ability to see the future, I have my doubts. It's great to imagine an ideal, however impractical -- unless it gets in the way of practical, incremental improvements. By diverting effort and resources to his fantasy, "Total Recall" may be more roadblock than highway to tomorrow.