“These moments… they belong to me, Alan. The good and the bad. They’re mine and his! Who are you to take them away from me? ” — The Final Cut
Gordon Bell, who has been working at Microsoft Research (after designing the VAX minicomputer), talks about his MyLifeBits in Scientific American. MyLifeBits attempts to create a digital archive of all his interactions with the world.
For the past six years, he has been recording all communications with other people and machines, as well as the images he sees, the sounds he hears and the Web sites he visits–storing everything in a personal digital archive that is both searchable and secure.
If current trends continue, within a decade you will be able to carry [a terabyte] of information in your cell phone’s flash memory, while connecting wirelessly to a $100 four-terabyte drive on your PC. In 20 years $600 will buy 250 terabytes of storage–enough to hold tens of thousands of hours of video and tens of millions of photographs. This capacity should be able to satisfy anyone’s recording needs for more than 100 years.At the same time, manufacturers are producing a new generation of inexpensive sensors that may soon become ubiquitous. Some of these devices can record a wealth of information about the user’s health and physical movements.
By linking metadata, much of which are obtained automatically, to digital memories, the database allows users to efficiently comb through even the largest archives.
To obtain a visual record of his day, Bell wears the SenseCam, a camera developed by Microsoft Research that automatically takes pictures when its sensors indicate that the user might want a photograph.
Particularly sensitive information that might put someone in legal jeopardy can be kept in an offshore data storage account–a “Swiss data bank,” if you will–to place it beyond the reach of U.S. courts. The children in the family can encrypt their recordings, but the LifeBits service will give the parents access to the data in case of an emergency.
When such employees leave their jobs, they may have to perform a “partial lobotomy” on their copies of the memories, expunging everything deemed to be company property.
