Microsoft boffin puts brain into e-coffin
Gordon Bell may well be a slightly peculiar man.
On the other hand, he may simply be the world's first e-philanthropist.
Bell, a researcher at Microsoft, has decided that it is, indeed, in the interests of science for him to commit every single nano-second of his brain's functions to a digital resting place, so that those in future times might see just what human life was like in our woeful, wobbling era.
According to CNN, Bell is just a little enthusiastic about this project. (Click here for a Q & A with Bell from February conducted by ZD Net U.K.)
He wafts around the world carrying more recording equipment than, well, CNN. He tapes conversations, trips, bills, medical records, and, for all I know, visits to the washroom to groom his nasal hair.
It's a lovely place. But would you want every second of your life there to be recorded?
(Credit: CC Robert Scoble/Flickr)He has even tried out a Microsoft invention called a SenseCam, which attempts to monitor and record as much of your life as is digitally possible in the form of images.
I know many of you will be wondering just how large the Kilimanjaro of information might be. Well, Bell seems to estimate it at some 350GB.
But it's another of his estimates which makes my body feel reluctant to welcome my breakfast. You see, Bell believes that by 2020 the whole of our lives will be online and searchable.
I find myself wondering just what kind of lives some of these big boffins have led. Isn't the real joy of life the mysteries rather than the facts?
Can anything truly replace the serendipity of love, the insanity of coincidence, the maniacal lunacy of the surprise, and the relief at finally forgetting some of the idiotic things we have done in our lives?
There is a woman namedJill Price, who suffers from hyperthymestic syndrome, the ability to remember absolutely everything about her life. It does not seem to make her unusually happy. How do I know? Well, she told ABC News: "It makes me crazy."
If everything is there for us to merely click and search, isn't that the moment when we cease to be human beings and become, well, Ray Kurzweil?
Perhaps you, too, might feel just a twinge of ironic joy at Bell's reply to one searchingly innocent question posed to him by CNN: "Are you on Facebook and Twitter?"
Bell replied: "Yeah, I'm on Facebook and Twitter and occasionally I will tweet something. Somehow my problem is that I don't think I have anything interesting to tweet about."
And yet we are supposed to trawl through 350 Gigabytes of mostly uninteresting life? Oh, its enough to make you want to sip pinot noir with your cornflakes.
Chris Matyszczyk is an award-winning creative director who advises major corporations on content creation and marketing. He brings an irreverent, sarcastic, and sometimes ironic voice to the tech world. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. 
And i remember Jason Bradbury (from The Gadget Show in the UK) had a webcam system on him that would record his life every so often and upload it to Flickr.
It was certainly an interesting thing to see.
I, too, used to run a webcam in my room pretty much all the time, but i eventually got bored of keeping it up.
And i couldn't justify the use of bandwidth since it had so little gain.
Without this kind of silly hype word, we see that Bell is just creating a library, no different than any of the presidential libraries.
I think it is a very interesting thing to do.
For peoples still alive, it?s unlike the girl who accessed the data all the time, the convenience is having it available when needed. Either for the curiosity, or need of a reference from detail in the past.
Wouldn?t like if it?s available to the internet or accessible to others by default though.
Now, let's imagine again, if such system was in place, are you allowed to touch the gloves without warning?
Thanks for your attention.
A codonologist.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0364343/
A recording device is embedded in a person and when they die a "cutter" pieces together a short video biography for their loved ones to remember them by.
EVERYTHING is recorded. Hmmm....
Most of us have a digital camera. At least on our phone. Often I hear my friends say, "I wish I had that on video." A modified version of the above could be a small unobtrusive video recorder that records a few hours at a time and rolls over. When something wonderful happens in life, you execute a function like, "Save the last 30 minutes." Then that is permanently recorded.
It would simply be a way of running a dvr of real life. In a business meeting and need to save the brain storm ideas? Playing the game of your life and you win the national championship? Saved. Lose? "Delete last 30 minutes..."
I doubt most people would be interested in saving the bad experiences. Seems people posting here have some kind of fear of an Orwellian constraint on their freedom to use such a device. Who knows? Maybe there WOULD be a huge market for seeing life through the eyes of Paris Hilton, Warren Buffet, or Peyton Manning?
Mostly I think it would be cool to automatically save great moments on demand. I see couples on their 10th comparing the first archived recordings they decided to save of each other, times flagged as "This might be the one."
Or have they considered that their o/s might not be around in about ten years..
Leaving his death as .... well. a joke for the next century ?
No, it's narcissim. You really think histororians will get a decent picture of "now" based off of one persons life? We all have a bias of some form, all they'll get is his.
Some side thoughts:
1: If you can say "save the last 30mn" and it's a permanent record, where is it being stored? If it's external, or even internal, there's communication going on. Watch The Ghost in the Shell: Laughing Man. Then think about the potential security implications of a system like that.
2: Really.. If they're going to record every detail of someones life, and literally every, then make it someone interesting. A female porn star for example.. "I got up, made breakfast, gave a talk on how my brain will be uploaded into digital memory, thought happy thoughts about how awesome I am, went to bed" vs "...". Well, you can guess. =P
3: Recording everything is already being tried out in cars, I don't have the details on me or in any place I've checked so far, but people thought about this a long time ago. To make it easier to catch criminals, find out who did what in an accident, etc.
4: Privacy issues here. Namely the lack of.. Billboards have cameras watching you, stores are wired up with more cameras then a movie recording studio, databases full of personal info.. There is a lack of privacy right now, using that sort of system.. That's insane.
People like this need to be institutionalized
- by J G M September 29, 2009 12:16 PM PDT
- The problem with saying that something like this is for "future research" is that it's a self-selecting sample, and one that is likely to be significantly at odds with anything you'd call "typical".
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