Book Review: Total Recall by Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell (Read Via Physical Book)

My interest in this book was triggered by a post from Steven Frank, one of the founders of one of my favorite software companies Panic.

For the review, I am going to re-blog his post because is pretty much spot on.

stevenf:

I just finished reading Total Recall (also on Kindle) (affiliate links, y’all)

The authors, Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell, helmed a research project called MyLifeBits at Microsoft in which they digitally stored as much information as possible about their daily lives in a personal database for later study and retrieval.

The central idea is that as the price of digital storage plunges ever downward as its capacity grows ever upward, it becomes almost a non-issue to store as much data as you can acquire about everything. Many people already store photos and music digitally. Maybe some videos. Maybe even scanned documents.

Bell and Gemmell take it to an extreme level, researching ideas like wearable cameras that sense “interesting” events based on sound levels, sudden changes in light level, and other cues. They record all their phone calls. They archive every web page they access.

This leads to questions of how it could conceivably benefit you to archive all this data, and what the social impact is of ubiquitous recording (surveillance?)

The authors address these questions with scenarios ranging from the far-fetched to the pragmatic and entirely believable.

And that, for me, was the most interesting aspect of the book: For every proposed idea that made me roll my eyes and think “come on, that’ll never happen”, there were two other ideas that I realized had already staked a claim in my life.

For instance:

1. I already use Google Voice to archive all my SMS and voicemails (with text transcriptions).

2. I have almost every email I’ve received for the last 12 years, less spam and some mailing lists.

3. I have a digital photo library spanning about a decade. Recent updates to iPhoto are now letting me add useful metadata such as who’s in the picture, and where it was taken (automatically in many cases). All my iPhone photos, for example, are already geotagged.

4. For the last few years, I’ve been scanning all invoices, statements, bills and the like that I haven’t been able to receive in PDF in the first place. Using the latest version of DEVONthink Pro Office, I can OCR the scans and have a fully Spotlight-searchable filing cabinet.

5. To help with my ongoing diet, I recently bought a Withings WiFi Body Scale which I just step on every morning, and my iPhone wirelessly updates a graph of my weight, BMI, and lean/fat mass.

6. I’m not using it so much any more, but the Nike+ sensor in my shoes can track how far I’ve walked, when, and at what speeds.

7. I’ve experimented with Vievu wearable video cameras. These were actually designed for law enforcement officers, but they make a lower-end model for techie consumers as well. I’ve rarely used it in real life though, because I’m not fully at ease with the implications of always-on video recording.

8. I’m constantly toying with new iPhone apps to find new ways of remotely accessing all this information, which is stored on my central Mac Pro server at home. I’m not sure when I’ll need to search for and pull up an arbitrary AT&T receipt PDF from anywhere in the world with just my phone — but I could do it if I ever had to. (Let us not disparage “because I can” as a reason to do anything.)

9. Anyone who uses Gmail is trained to archive, not delete.

10. Google Web History (unfortunately only available in the Google toolbar for Firefox and IE users) allows you to search your browsing history, if desired. A lighter version, which archives just your search (and search results) history is available to all browsers.

All of this automatic monitoring freaks some people out. The question of whether or not privacy is dead is not a question I feel equipped to answer. I personally find it fascinating, and even occasionally quite useful.

So, if this sort of thing interests you, the book is a thought-provoking read. It is more conceptual than a how-to — since a lot of these ideas are still in their infancy, it’s up to you to figure out what tools to cobble together to implement them.

There’s also a blog to accompany the book, if you’re so inclined.

One thing I would like to add is an except from the book pages 53-54

THE INESCAPABLE FRAILTY OF BIO-MEMORY

The memories in our brains are stored as patterns of connections between neurons, or nerve cells. Computers store information in a series of microscopic switches turned on or off. Brains and computers both store information, Manipulate it, and use it to decide between courses of action. For these reasons we say that both systems have “memory,’ but this similarity only holds up in the first approximation. Scratch the surface and you find vast differences between biological and digital memory.

To the owner of a human brain, memory feels like a single resource. it turns out this feeling is an illusion. Scientists who study biological memory describe three distinct systems.

• Procedural memory, sometimes known as muscle memory, is for physical skills such as riding a bike, ballet dancing, typing.
• Semantic memory encodes meanings, definitions, and concepts-facts that you know that aren’t rooted in time or place, such as “A cat has four legs’ or “The capital of Japan is Tokyo.”
• Episodic memory, sometimes known as autobiographical memory, encodes experiences from your past. This is what allows you to know about and re-experience the things that have happened in your life, such as the time you sprained your ankle at the playground and your father bought you and ice-cream sunday to make you feel better, or the shower you took an hour ago.

Nothing is coming soon that can help us with our procedural memory. But our semantic and episodic bio-memories can and will be extended by our e-memories. …

I found this point very fascinating.  I believe this piece gives a very valid indicator on how education has to change moving forward in the time that is coming where everyone has an e-memory. That we have to develop A: how to learn - the classic system we have today. Moreover B: develop a wide range of procedural memory - the base skill-set everyone needs to function.

At the end of the day, I do see there is tremendous value in this data. The only problem is with the philosophy of human nature and its trait of corruption. Jon Voight’s character Thomas Reynolds in the movie Enemy of the State puts is best:

Thomas Reynolds: We never dealt with domestic. With us, it was always war. We won the war. Now we’re fighting the peace. It’s a lot more volatile. Now we’ve got ten million crackpots out there with sniper scopes, sarin gas and C-4. Ten-year-olds go on the Net, downloading encryption we can barely break, not to mention instructions on how to make a low-yield nuclear device. Privacy’s been dead for years because we can’t risk it. The only privacy that’s left is the inside of your head. Maybe that’s enough. You think we’re the enemy of democracy, you and I? I think we’re democracy’s last hope.

For providing such a great point of view, and I believe a very valid opinion of the realistic future ahead of us. I give it a 9/10.

-Kevin