Tag: memory

Total history

Where total history comes to the layperson.

We’ve had agriculture for ~12 ka, towns for 10 ka, and writing for ~5 ka. But we’re still living in the dark ages leading up to the dawn of history. Don’t we have history already, you ask? Well actually, we don’t. We know much less about our ancestors than our descendants will know about us. Indeed, we’ve acquired bad behavioral habits – because we’re used to forgetting things over time. In fact, collectively we’re on the edge of losing the ability to forget.

2012-05-06: The transcribed Life. It may already be possible to have your smartphone record every sound it can pick up, and transcribe it continuously. What are the implications when you can search your words and those you interact with?
2013-11-23: Before and after. Meanwhile, someone taped 35 years of TV

Total history is something we haven’t experienced yet. I expect to live long enough to be lifelogging, but my first 40 or 50 years are going to be very poorly documented, mere gigabytes of text and audio to document decades of experience. What I can be fairly sure of is that our descendants’ relationship with their history is going to be very different from our own, because they will be able to see it with a level of depth and clarity that nobody has ever experienced before. Meet your descendants. They don’t know what it’s like to be involuntarily lost, don’t understand what we mean by the word “privacy”, and will have access (sooner or later) to a historical representation of our species that defies understanding. They live in a world where history has a sharply-drawn start line, and everything they individually do or say will sooner or later be visible to everyone who comes after them, forever.

2017-04-11: Truth

2023-02-24: Others are thinking about the implications, now with a LLM lens

Sooner or later, every single conversation I have will be recorded and transcribed and I’ll be able to look back at it later – details from a phone call with the bank, in the hardware store asking a question, someone mentions a book at the pub, an idea in a workshop. Ignoring the societal consequences for a sec lol ahem… how should the app to manage all that chatter work?

LifeBrowser

Horvitz wanted to use his research in memory landmarks to help people to find what they are looking for within their growing personal stores of information. He and his team developed a rich timeline of different types of landmarks that Horvitz refers to as a “memory backbone” for navigating content. They combined the predictive models for calendar events and images and added a user’s computer activities, such as files created or edited and Web pages visited. They also added public news events. They organized the results into a timeline browser they call LifeBrowser. The LifeBrowser interface allows you to search your memories just as you can search the Internet. You can access a news event on the timeline such as “Seattle Earthquake,” or personal events, such as “Travel to DC” or “Group Off-site,” and view emails that you sent or received, documents that you worked on, and Web sites that you visited at these times. A memorability slider allows users to control the detail displayed in the memory backbone. You can display just a few ‘most memorable’ events or include a larger number of events, some of which will fall into the ‘less memorable’ category.

bayesian models to help your recollection. ship it, microsoft.

Fugue

Man as robot

Joe Bieger wandered the city for nearly a month lost in a fugue state, a strange form of amnesia thought to be triggered by stress or other conflict. One morning, Joe stepped out of his house to walk his dogs and, within moments, had all his memories erased.

2016-11-21:Fugue memories are never recovered

It seems astonishing, at first glance, that a man can live 20 years of life without leaving a mark. And yet, in this regard, Powell was not unique at all. Many people are just as disconnected from the world as Benjaman Kyle. 1000s of people die alone and unidentified each year, and are buried in nameless graves. They represent the most isolated members of society: the elderly, the homeless, the undocumented immigrants far from home—people who have been pushed to society’s margins. Like Powell, they are found stripped—in Powell’s case, literally—of any link to their legal identity. It was only an apparent accident of his brain that caused him to lose his identity in life, not death. Had he died in front of the dumpster in Richmond Hill, his body would not have become an object of national fascination and intense speculation; it would have spent eternity interred in a potter’s field. Instead, he was reborn twice: first as Benjaman Kyle, and then, again, as William Powell.

False Web Memories

Can an interactive website produce false memories? Schlosser performed an intriguing experiment: She took 2 groups of people and had them check out 2 different web sites devoted to the same digital camera. 1 site included static pictures; the other was interactive, allowing users to play around with a virtual version of the product. Later, she tested them on their ability to recall details about the camera. She intentionally included details that were false, but sufficiently plausible that they might have been true. The result? The people who viewed the interactive demo of the camera were much more likely than the folks who’d only viewed static images to “remember” the false details as being present.

there is a lesson for compelling UIs in there somewhere. or maybe for mischief.

Perfect Memory Man

an update on the mylifebits project. when are they productizing?

Gordon Bell will never forget what I look like. He’ll never forget what I sound like, either. Actually, he’ll never forget a single detail about me.

That’s because when I first met the 72-year-old computer scientist, he was recording my every move. He had a tiny bug-eyed camera around his neck, and a small audio recorder at his elbow. As we chatted about various topics — Australian jazz musicians, his futuristic cell phone, the Seattle area’s gorgeous weather — Bell’s gear quietly logged my every gesture and all my blathering small talk, snapping a picture every 60 seconds. Back at his office, his computer had carefully archived every document related to me: all the email I’d sent him, copies of my articles he’d read, pages he’d surfed on my blog.