Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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.

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

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.

I read this book after seeing it advertised in Evernote (an app I use for tracking random bits of info). It basically describes current trends in personal data storage and management, and then how that could change how you personally store and retrieve info in the future. The main premise is that data storage is cheap and getting cheaper every day, and retrieval technologies (indexing, etc) are getting good enough that with a bit of advanced prep you could store everything you ever see, and have it at your fingertips forever.

This is a light read and is not a technical book. It is aimed at the masses, not the technorati. I'm a retired Microsoftie so probably not the target audience but I still found it interesting. And I have started scanning and then throwing away a lot more stuff after reading this book.

What to say about a book claiming, 'Everything' will be changed by the ability to capture, 'Total' digital records of everything that happens to you? This book says creating e-Memories are here, mixed with, some of it's on the way.

'Everything' consists of a much lower resolution then reality. Just digital images (scan, photo, a small bit of video), perhaps audio, and text. Not 24/7. No stereoscopic images. Nothing 3-D. No touch, smell, taste. No shiny gold-tape playback of e-Memories like in the movie, 'Brainstorm.'

'Total' consisting of some things we choose, some things we don't, some have legal issues.

Without a staff, interns, custom written software, hardware, and funding by a large corporation, it seems clear that 'Everything' and 'Total' will be boiled down to tiny e-Memories for most of us.

The premise is great and the current delivery may not be here, doesn't mean that this discussion isn't worth the read. I like the book for revealing so much about where current technology could go. Setting the goal for, 'a lifetimes worth of data' brings in very interesting issues. Perhaps, greater usability could come from intelligent built software for managing data. The less maintenance one does, the greater the benefit. A good example is automatic time and location stamping of digital photos.

The book does cover some interesting concepts about how embedded and integrated technology could have a greater impact on our lives. Though it seems to shy away from the corporate economic hold that technology has on individual data. Who owns your data? How private is private? How secure is it? Will it be accessible at a future point? How does it all get paid for? Will we sale Ad Space to support our e-Memories? Will people make comments on your e-Memories? Do people really want to spend time collecting data about their lives?

The methods described don't really address people who already do keep handwritten or visual journals. An area that technology has found difficult to solve. Yet, Leonardo Da Vinci's journals are some of the most interesting records of man we have from the past. Not because it tells us what his heart rate was, or which streets in Milan he walked, but because his creative thinking was captured in drawings and text. I believe that until common technology supports direct input of handwriting and drawing, it'll be difficult to have paperless e-Memories.

According to the authors, having a digital version of something, means you discard the original. Difficult for me to believe? Just because there's a digital copy of the Mona Lisa, I would not throw the original away. Even the author makes the point in getting started (Page 204) that an important task is to, "Third, make a print version of your interactive data." Paper requires no power source to access and no decrypting. There is a bit of irony, that the authors printed a book to discuss everything becoming digital and paperless.

It isn't just the software formats that become inaccessible, but also the physical format. Floppy disk and SCSI hard drives are losing the ability to connect with new computers. How far into the future will the current format of CDs and DVDs reach? How many different times will we purchase, 'Dark Side of the Moon,' or 'Snow White? ' Moving the data forward becomes more difficult the more you record and the idea that one has to keep converting it along, makes paper look the most stable storage. When I'm gone, who will keep converting my digital memories into future formats?

Current technology seems small when compared to how big and infinite the universe really is. Can our lives really be captured in a few bytes of data? Do these records constitute a copy of who I am? Even the vast Internet, as big as it is, is still missing a lot of data. How will the Internet deal with some of these issues? I like this book a lot, not for what it says as believable, but because I hope it will spark the conversation about how to make technology that serves the user. What is the lifelong format? How do I get my data out of software and formats that go obsolete?

This book frames the most important questions everyone should be asking about the function and purpose of technology in our lives. Do we want to spend our time creating, maintaining, and using any technology that gives us no control, integration, or future access?

This is the most interesting scientific book that I have ever read. If you are interested about the future of science and even mankind get this book. By reading this book you will realize how the future will be changed by this technology. As authors have mentioned e-memories will perform a significant changes in our life as internet and mobile phone did.
It is about e-memories and the changes that it will perform from Labs to home.

Every since I read "The Road Ahead" by Bill Gates I've been thinking about how the technology coming will record everything.. and how much that is akin to what we were taught in Sunday School about God knowing everything we did.

Today, that's coming true. Not from angels writing it down in a books on high, but self reported GPS, tweets, posts and purchase records.

"Total Recall" is a hand on look at just how close we are.. and why most of us will want to embrace this.

TOTAL RECALL: HOW THE E-MEMORY REVOLUTION WILL CHANGE EVERYTHING comes from a legendary computer scientist and a Microsoft senior researcher who reveal the social, political and technological changes coming from a new digital revolution. New innovations in memory and search techniques will soon make it possible to record and recall everything one has ever seen or done. Total Recall will have vast impact across society and will change the world: this study tells how to anticipate changes and is a top pick for general and college-level collections across the board.

As a user of digital scan of personnal documents since almost 10 years the ideas in this book talk very much to me.
Yes it s possible and useful to scan, digitalise, register big part of your life.

But no, it's not useful to digitalise almost all of your life. Because , like the majority of people, 90 % of your life have almost no interest for others people. Not everyone is a international risk investor , not everyone had graduated from schools with ancient students network . For simple people and simple life i doubt very much that the digitalising process will be pratical within ten year.
As a programmer and also user of Alfresco or spip i regret that the practical advices at the end of the book are too much simple. Why the writers don't examine ontology creation, usage and problems ?

As a citizen i regret very much the naive oulook of the writers on the juridic and political problems if their vision come to exist in full in the near futur.

I think in general most people can give you plenty of reasons why you wouldn't want total recall. Bell provides great examples of the benefits and advantages. I think many people will consider this a value proposition even given the potential risks or negatives that may occur. Very happy with the purchase at the very least you should give the sample a try.