Digital brain
The Microsoft Media Presence lab is developing something called MyLifeBits, a multimedia database to store everything that ever happens to you. The idea is that you can then easily find what you’re looking for.
“The motivation? Microsoft argues that our memories often deceive us: experiences get exaggerated, we muddle the timing of events and simply forget stuff. Much better, says the firm, to junk such unreliable interpretations and instead build a faithful memory on that most reliable of entities, the PC.”
Eeek. PCs, reliable? I can just imagine the lawsuits when someone’s whole life goes up in digital smoke. It would give a whole new meaning to Blue Screen of Death. Not the mention the total spookiness of Microsoft having even more control over your life.
On the one hand, I need something like this - badly. On the other, I think that memory is unreliable for a reason. If you couldn’t suppress the bad things and promote the good things in your memory, life would be rather grim. How else can you explain women having a second child?
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Did you read "Woman on the Edge of Forever" by Marge Piercy? Some of the characters live in a future utopia and wear "kenners" on their wrists which act as an extrasomatic perfectly retrievable memory of everything that happens to them. In a dramatic turn, a character's kenner is partially distroyed, and feels as if a large part of his self is gone too.
I read this book in the late 70s, so never thought how ugly it would be if a kenner were built by M$. I thought it would be a cool thing then.
I like your blog. Please keep it.
by rosewood @ 28/11/2002 9:12 pm • Permalink •
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