Commentary on Total Recall

It's not about recall; it's most certainly not about retrieval of information; it's not even about total (accessing everything). It's about knowledge and especially knowing what's important to know. Without this foundation and the discipline necessary to maintain and improve it, there is no possibility of wisdom. No matter how much some may ignore it, there is an inherent hierarchy down from wisdom to knowledge to information to data.

Until my friend Pam pointed it out (yeah, obvious in hindsight) neither Gordon Bell or I imagined that people might use the capability of Total Recall solely for the purpose of reliving their distant past. In effect: Time Travel! Beyond that, I hate to think what depressives might do with Total Recall, i.e., endlessly rehash their past — not a healthy thing. But none of this is nearly as dangerous as the possibility of someone getting their hands on your Total Recall. (When it comes to computing, you can never say it can't be done.)

When Gordon Bell talks about using e-textbooks with Total Recall, he opens up the door to the question of what things (e.g., e-books) can be purchased to add to your Total Recall. But if you just purchase access (and don't actually use it) is it part of your Total Recall? An example: I have lots of books on my bookshelves. Almost all of which I've read but there are still a handful I haven't. How does he expect Total Recall to handle this? Should it track only what I read? Will it ignore books I have at the ready but don't look at? Does this means leaving out the pages I skip? Duplicating the pages I reread?
        In the first place, what's the point of acquiring what passes before my eyes if it's already an e-book? And how am I helped by Total Recall saving ten copies of a paragraph I've read ten times. Wouldn't it be easier if I just told Total Recall to save the contents of the book? But what about the books on my shelf, the ones I have immediate access to but haven't read? Don't I want these to be accessible also? But then I can't treat Total Recall as a dumb capture device; I must tell it what I want saved (or at least access to) and what I don't. How is that not more work for me?
        Now you might think since so many books are already online and available as e-books (the former free, the later for a price), I would want as much access as I can get (for as little as I can pay). Not really. What I want (and remember Total Recall is supposed to be a personal tool) is pretty much what I have now. That is, some books I haven't read but are readily at hand; a list of books I'm trying to get to (in an ever-changing priority order); and the rest of the world of books on the Internet. What's important about my approach is that I choose which books are in which subset, something no dumb capture device can do for me. And I doubt a search engine will ever be clever enough.

Now for the problem with e-textbooks. If so much of the student's mind is externalized in Total Recall, then how can he or she take a test without Total Recall? Taking a test without Total Recall means memorization, doesn't it? (Bell talks a lot about how Total Recall eliminates the need for memorization.) But taking a test with it only tests the student's ability to access the information. I don't get it.
        And I know why: he's grafting Total Recall onto the existing education system. Doesn't seem to realize that if used to its full capacity Total Recall should revolutionize the existing system. And if it doesn't then it's not the great revolutionary product he claims it is. Anything that perpetuates the current system is, clearly, part of the problem.

The whole point of starting a digital immortality site now is to control what you throw out to the Internet. How often do we hear people complain about being quoted out of context? Well, we now have the means to control at least one official copy of that context.
        Besides, everything you put on the Internet now will not a) remain out there and b) not remain in its original form. If you care about what you say, if you want accurate attributions for what you say, then you have to have protected copies on YOUR digital immortality site. This not just a function you need now, but also long after you're dead.

1) On page 9, he says: "The hard part . . . is how to organize it, sort it, access it, and find patterns and meaning in it." He talks about accessing all your data with a search program. In the future. He does mention he's been working on this project for about ten years. He also mentions using such a search program would be similar to searching your hard drive. Let's see if I understand: this project, Microsoft's MyLifeBits, has yet to produce a scaled down version of Bell's monster search program that the rest of us could use now to search our hard drives (I have three physical drives on this machine, seven on my network). Given the current state of Microsoft's search capabilities and the obvious need for improvement, I have to conclude Bell's program is a little more complicated than he implies. Otherwise, we would have already had a scaled-down version for a few years — and an improvement or two.
        We would, if they cared about smaller, useful tools. If you're interested, here's what they do have:

"The software research: Jim Gemmell and Roger Lueder have developed the MyLifeBits software, which leverages SQL server to support: hyperlinks, annotations, reports, saved queries, pivoting, clustering, and fast search. MyLifeBits is designed to make annotation easy, including gang annotation on right click, voice annotation, and web browser integration. It includes tools to record web pages, IM transcripts, radio and television. The MyLifeBits screensaver supports annotation and rating. We are beginning to explore features such as document similarity ranking and faceted classification. We have collaborated with the WWMX team to get a mapped UI, and with the SenseCam team to digest and display SenseCam output."

2) How do you know what to search for? Searching a menu is easy when you're in a restaurant, but how do you know when you will be hungry and could use a menu? Bell seems to be a very practical person, but can he imagine the search needs of a poet? Or the serendipity of having totally incongruous things just pop into your head? Could a computer program really do that? Not simply random information, but meaningful random information.
        He talks about searching data, but how do you connect the smells? Or, more to his point, how do you catalogue a photograph? Beyond time, place, objects, and persons, there are other connections. Was it part of a particular trip? The reason you took that trip? Who wasn't on the trip, and why? If you're in the picture, was it taken by a loved one or a complete stranger? How about the weather (sometimes very relevant)? What is its sequence in a group of photos? And the smells? At some point, we realize cataloging the data about the photograph could be more complex than the content of the photo. Perhaps, the computer can help with this cataloging, but it looks like a lot of work for us.
        I will admit this becomes easier if you're capturing all the sights and sounds before your eyes and ears, as he proposes we will all be doing with a decade or so. But how do you add in your emotions? Does he think these are irrelevant? Or does he think we will re-create them when we retrieve the data? But isn't that what we do now when we stumble into a reminiscence? And aren't the best travel books about what the writer has learned from the experience? That isn't automatically captured and stored on a computer; it comes from contemplation and reflection. Experience, as Aldous Huxley said, isn't what happens to us, it's what we make of what happens to us. The system proposed in Bell's Total Recall is capturing merely what happens. We'll still have to rely on our poor old brains to process that into an experience. And if our catch-all computer grabber saves everything, maybe later we can find the original data and relive it. If we're lucky.

On page 8 of his new book, Total Recall, Gordon Bell mentions Proust. LOL. No, make that LOLROFPIMP (as the new generation of textists say, Laughing Out Loud, Rolling On Floor, Peeing In My Pants). Proust? Has Bell read (or like most, tried to read) Proust? It's not about remembering facts, it's about remembering, or more accurately reliving, emotions. So tell me, Gordon, just how is your giant fact collector going to help us recall our emotions? A: it can only do so in the same way that faded photograph from the shoebox in the closet helps us recreate the emotion of the moment. Re-create, re-call, re-member — it's all imperfect human reconstruction rather than perfect computer retrieval. Imperfect, just as we are now — irrespective of Bell's promise of perfect storage of all the external data of our lives. What he promises will be a great boon for lawyers and probably doctors. But what about artists and writers? What about the philosophers? The promise is technologically amazing, but the result seems to make us a little less human.