when your computer won’t let you forget
Imagine that you have access to every second of your life, and not just in a short, summarized form. No, we’re talking about a second by second recording of everything that ever happened to you in your whole lifetime. It’s one of the technologies that Singularitarians believe will bring humans one step closer to digital immortality, and is now the subject of a book by a duo of computer scientists who say that cataloguing every moment of your life and storing it all on future computer networks will become possible in the very, very near future.
Technically, Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell are correct. Storing plenty of audio, video and basic physiological signals is easy. All you really need is enough storage. But while this idea is feasible and kind of nifty, it’s also highly impractical and the problems it raises may far outweigh the benefits it can offer. Israeli neuroscientist Yadin Dudai sums both the premise behind the concept, and its core problem, best in his review…
It’s an extended corporate US manifesto, whose explicit slogan is: “I hate to lose my memories. I want total recall.” The subtext is a bit more naive: I want total control over my life, I want immortality. If only I could record and store everything, I would become Homo eternicus. [...]
For the human condition, forgetting is at least as important as remembering – sometimes more so. No forgetting implies no generalization, no real present time, no amelioration of trauma, and no weaving of meaningful life narratives.
Do you really want to remember everything you’ve ever done considering how many of us have moments we’d rather not bring up? And can you imagine the monumental invasions of privacy when it comes to a court case in which lawyers request access to the libraries of data files about your life to find the evidence they want and publicly air it during hearings? Your life would not just become an on-demand reality show, and one that’s up for review, scrutiny and even hacking by curious strangers with potentially nefarious motives. Another thing to ponder is how much do you want to flood the web with the minutia of everyday life? It’s not like we don’t do this already with the overuse overly personal tweets and status messages on Facebook to the ever-present hum of people who think that much of social media is a waste of bandwidth and storage space.
But of course, there’s an interesting undertone to this book. It’s actually a promotional piece behind the idea of digitally storing your important documents and selling software that lets you manage this media library with a software package like MyLifeBits. One wonders why you can’t do that with existing media libraries which give you plenty of options for organizing and annotating your media files, and how exactly this research is anything new, exciting or revolutionary, but then again, this is the tech world’s way of pitching a new brand of software. It has to be presented as The Next Big Thing, even when the basic idea has been around since Neolithic times and we’ve already come up with dozens of perfectly viable ways for accomplishing the tasks involved.
There are so many things to springboard from with this topic, it’s hard to know where to begin!
Right now, people are so paranoid over “Big Brother” that they protest ridiculous premises like RFID “spying,” claiming that someone could find out so much personal information about any individual. Apparently, knowing (from the microchip embedded in the packaging) that I bought Lucky Charms this weekend is something that can be exploited against me in some way, never mind that this can be determined by simply looking in my shopping cart. Recording every thing that someone has ever done or experienced? No, I can’t see such a system, were it possible, being popular. And the opportunities to abuse it, as noted, are numerous.
But how would you even go about procuring such information anyway? We are decades, if not centuries, away from breaking down the human brain enough to know how information is stored within it, much less being able to effectively read and collate such info. So you’re down to the idea of recording the input from the senses in real time, either externally (audio and visual recording), or internally by intercepting the signals our senses send to the brain. And this has to be done from Day One, or at least, early enough to make the archive worthwhile. How many things do you want to implant into an infant’s head? Two for the eyes, two for the ears, one for the nose, one for the mouth, and what, a feed off the spinal column for the tactile input of the rest of the body?
Certainly, there have been enough things I would like to recall better, as well as things I’d like to forget (the latter probably outnumbers the former). Can I erase certain memories from the archive? This wouldn’t necessarily matter to me directly, since my own brain maintains them, but from the standpoint of sharing them, well…
And can I relive the ones I like? This strikes me as being a very bad thing, probably the most addictive behavior imaginable. And of course, while replaying these memories, are they getting rerecorded at that time? This sounds like an Escher print…
Memory is also subjective. The associations I have created over my lifespan, their meanings and emotional impact, are a prime factor in the memory itself, and would likely bear a reduced to nonexistent association to anyone but me anyway. Is the endorphin rush that occurs when Trixie smiles at me getting logged too? Because if it isn’t, the life that is being recorded is flat and two-dimensional.
Now, what kind of psychological damage is there potential for here? Even if there is no access to the records in any way, how would most people react to knowing that somewhere sits everything they are? How do you make decisions when there’s a constant audience? Even clinical paranoia doesn’t deal with this level of supposed scrutiny.
And imagine the pariah you would become if you were the “records everything” person? Office conversations, relationships, even family get-togethers – write them off, because too many people are going to be creeped out by even being near you.
And to address the “immortality” aspect. Sure, fine, my memories live forever (or until plasma cube storage goes obsolete and no one remembers to upgrade.) What would I get from this? My body, the thing that experiences it all in the first place, is still going to die. Recordings are not life/consciousness, and even if someone manages to figure out how to jump from data to interaction, e.g., artificial cognitive thought, and therefore produce a “living” brain, that’s still not me. In fact, that’s something getting the benefit of being me while I, specifically, do not. I mean, yeah, so?
My life experience may be there for anyone to examine. The point is, will anyone care? How many people that you know right now are people you really feel the need to know explicitly, inside-out as it were? The key part to a legacy isn’t that it’s available, it’s that it provides a benefit to future generations. It might be really cool to experience Einstein’s moments of insight, but would they necessarily have advanced us any? He explained them pretty well while he was alive. Knowing what is was that bogged him down didn’t lead to the advances we’ve made since – that took the thoughts of other individuals who worked outside of his particular blind spots.
Implanting knowledge, the old “thought transfer” staple of science fiction, is thousands of times more useful. I’d love to learn quantum physics or advanced biology in an afternoon. Anyone working on that?