matt20 writes "I've often wondered what it would take to condense the essence of my life and put it in a searchable format. Well, it looks like that may become a reality. Engineers are working on software to load every photo you take, every letter you write - in fact your every memory and experience - into a surrogate brain that never forgets anything. Here is the article found in New Scientist."
Not to get off-topic, but I heard on the radio this morning that they (dept. of homeland security) are going to create a database of every purchase by every American in their effort to fight terrrorist.
scary.
I have said this before: there have long been records of the youngsters', particularly newborns', foot- and fingerprints. No shit, there was a movement to have even your elementary schoool kids as early as the 1980s in order to "protect your children" against kidnappers, molesters, etc. Now with this department the gov't would probably be able to access that at will, as well as any other database - let alone create a master database.
There will never be criminals in the US ever again. What a country!
There will never be criminals in the US ever again. What a country!
Correction.
There will never be innocents in the US ever again.
With this kind of information at their disposal anyone can be made to appear to be guilty of just about anything. Add secret trials and a general terror-hysteria to the mix and you get an environment that makes Orwell's vision almost pleasant by comparison.
When I worked on a left-wing paper in the '70s, we used to say that we didn't mind the FBI spies and bugs, but we felt that they should at least be willing to provide us copies of the minutes of our staff meetings.
The part *I* thought was ridiculous about fallibility was, "Much better, says the firm, to junk such unreliable interpretations and instead build a faithful memory on that most reliable of entities, the PC." Granted, I may forget where I put my keys now and again, but my brain's never turned blue and needed to be restarted...though I have suffered some memory leaks. hm.
Ok, so I fork over my money, I've got this shiny new DVD with the sum total of my existance on it. Aside from being horribly depressing, so what? What can I do with it? Store it for safekeeping in case of a terrible car accident which leaves me without my memory? No problem! A quick hard reboot with disc inserted (yuck) and I'm better?
Seriously though, aside from being incredibly cool, what's the use of this thing? To pass on to relatives after you're gone? Nefarious use in our legal system? Coaster ("Don't put your drink on the table, use Aunt Jenny instead...")?
I could actually refute all the assertions my ex-wife used to make
Any male who gathers evidence preemptively to use against a female (unless she's an adversary) is just digging his own grave. Just roll over like you're supposed to; you'll be happier. You can know you're right all you want, just don't try to prove it.
It is part of a curious venture dubbed the MyLifeBits project, in which engineers at Microsoft's Media Presence lab in San Francisco are aiming to build multimedia databases that chronicle people's life events and make them searchable.
Anyone want to take bets on how fast MyLifeBits will be selling off your personal info? True if you doubt Microsoft's dubious motivation and believe they're working for the greater good, this still brings a new meaning to 'single point of failure'.
Engineers are working on software to load every photo you take, every letter you write - in fact your every memory and experience - into a surrogate brain that never forgets anything.
I presume you must have to add stuff to this 'archive' manually? What happens if you forget? I know I probably would.
Just saw a similar article [bbc.co.uk] come through the BBC. To quote: "Microsoft researchers are working on ways to create a 'back-up brain' that will do a much better job of containing and cataloguing every picture you take, document you write or conversation you record." The program is called MyLifeBits.
...and a link to Gordon Bell [microsoft.com]'s work page.
That's cool. I'm about to start my own project, called MyLifeBites. It'll be a focus group helping nerdy Slashdotters come to grips with the fact that there's nothing in their lives worth backing up.
Not very useful for people like me who are lucky to take 1 photo a year.. I think I've got a grand total of a few dozen photos from when I was born to now (that's 22 years, no wise cracks please!:P).
Email might be a little better, but considering my best reply time is in the order of 2-4 weeks, I don't get a whole lot of that either..
Tell me when they can download my real memories, then I'll be impressed.
-Nutter
How long after this becomes avaliable will the first supeona for full access be issued - for example in a divorce court, patent dispute antitrust case...
Taken from the article=> ....build a faithful memory on that most reliable of entities, the PC.... Umm....Why do I feel that was one sarcastic comment in the article???
WOW! A microsoft solution capable of recording all our actions for a year!
We all knew it was going to happen someday, Microsoft would own our memories. Can you imagine the DCMA violations trying to break the compy protect to view your own memories? What type of lawsuits are we going to get into when we just claim to remember doing it, and no we didn't reference the MyLifeBits database?
The media would have fun with this. We could have "Truman Shows" playing back the MyLifeBits database files 24x7. Imagine the pirated copies of the next serial killer, or thrill seeker.
The letter combination DVD isn't to be found anywhere in the article.
There's talk about 1000gb harddiscs, but not DVDs.
One of the stupidest headlines on/. in a while...
As to the idea it self: why? I don't need to excatly what or how I said something to my friends or family. In fact I dont want to...
One good idea, that they don't mention, would be automatic transscription of the audio conversations, thrus making them searchable. Now, that would be nice...
I have to appreciate the way the article has a hair-raising exaggeration...
[...] in fact your every memory and experience [...]
... right next to Our Old Friends...
[...] engineers at Microsoft's Media Presence lab [...]
For those who can't be bothered to read the article (my advice: don't), a short summary: in a couple of years (like, five) 1-TB hard drives will cost ~USD300. A new trademark, "MyLifeBits", which is basically a (gasp) *searchable* database can be filled with everyPhotoYouEverTake, everySoundYouEverHear, everyTextYouEverRead (yadda yadda) as a kind of, er, diary. (For the yougsters: a "diary" is a private, dead-tree blog).
No word on how you are supposed to get the information in there... which would sort of be the interesting bit, dontchathink? What is this? MS anti-FUD?
and instead build a faithful memory on that most reliable of entities, the PC.
Seriously?
Do the guys at Microsoft seriously consider the PC to be a most reliable of entities? Man, you think after years of running Windows you'd know better.
As for the database, that sounds like it would be an enormous amount of work to keep up, and wouldn't be that useful day to day unless you were carrying it with you. I forget to take pictures, how am I going to remember to upload the pictures I actually take? And has anyone ever gone back and reread their old email...BORING... unless you're narsisistic who cares what you posted on/. two years ago.
This thing sounds good in theory, but in practice people just are not taking that many pictures or writing that many memorable letters. This will be a product for the vain, the famous and the rich who don't know what else to spend their money on. ------
As for the database, that sounds like it would be an enormous amount of work to keep up
It would be self-limiting. Once you started on this project, you wouldn't be able to do more than a set amount per day, or it would take too long to enter into the database.
Monday - went to swell party after dinner, but had to leave at 10PM so I'd have time to enter into my database what a good time I was having before I left.
In the end, only people with no life would have time to put in their life.
I've already done this. I have a CD (which friends refer to as "the football") on which I have backed up scanned images of my birth certificate, medical records, school records, every photo I have (2000+), every development project I've worked on, every short story/paper I've ever written, and a database in which I store daily entries of my activities.
Yes, it sounds obsessive compulsive, and maybe it is. I do it because I like to have my life backed up in case of household disaster. Also, I've found that having that data with me all the time is very helpful--I carry a floppy with it so I can open anything I'm working on and save it.
Another reason I do it (especially the log/database) is that I don't like the idea of not knowing about my own life. I found the days going by in a blur before I kept track of things.
The only drawback is that I'm relying more and more on this CD instead of memory, which may be reducing it.
In the compliance lab I work in, anything we do needs to be documented to prove that it happened. We always joked that we need miner's helmets with little cameras attached that always film what we do. That's what this looks like...
OK, so they have some database, that can store various files and you can search it - AFTER you tag it. And that's the problem: adding meaningful comments to all the little tidbits. I have bought a digicam a little more than a year ago: I have taken approx 2000 pictures since that. I could put together some little scripts that search the JPEG's EXIF tags for comments but I can not be bothered to type it in. No way, that's not something I want to do. Easing/automatating this process is the thing that should be addressed (which is, I do realise, is far from trivial), but it's not dealt with. Then I have all the emails I have ever sent or received (minus SPAM). Grepping it is something that is useful but it can be frustrating to remembering the exact words, then realizing that a synonym was used or there was a typo: so there is also space for improvement, but this project does not seems to address this problem. So, to have the obligatory SP reference, this project seems to be supposed work like this: 1. Throw all the stuff you have into a database 2. ??? 3. Have your whole life easily searchable
First of all, this seems like a multimedia digital diary. Neat idea, but how many people actually keep a diary or journal and keep it up to date? Next, the article makes it sound simple when they talk about recording your "every memory and experience" as if you just plug into something like in the movie "Brainstorm". How do they accomplish this one? If this technology existed I am sure we would have heard something about it (at least here on/.)!
That's what Pointdexter's about to discover. These guy too. That my brain can store a 100 terabytes of data is almost immaterial if its all undifferentiated.
Running a Google search engine on an ever growing mass of data data is not enough.
The data has to be corelated. The engine has to understand, (read that word again, understand, an AI problem,) what its looking at and the appropriate level of granularity to use when parsing the data when extracting the memes it contains.
Our computers are damn near deaf, dumb, blind and stupider than cockroackes and we're having systemic, Korzibskian semantic anomalies and pattern recognition failures as it is.
I'd be happy when one has the information processing capacity of an annoying Pomeranian. It'll be about as useful too but I'd be happy.
A system like MyLifeBits was first suggested in 1945, when presidential technology adviser Vannevar Bush hatched the then farsighted idea of an infinite personal archive based on the emerging digital computer.
Hmmm, sounds like the Farleyfile. (copied from Jerry Pournelle's page [jerrypournelle.com]): Big Jim Farley was a New York Tammany Hall politician whose success was partly due to the "Farleyfile": a collection of facts about everyone he ever met. If you went to see Big Jim, by the time you got into his office he knew your name, your birthday, the names of your spouse and children, and what you liked for lunch. It was all on file.
Also, there's a program (Lifesigns?) that's based around a chronological history of data (there's a PC version, and there was a Newton version). You don't go searching for "Letter about Enron", you remember that it was 7 or 8 months ago, and look at email then. Clever premise, loved by all the people who adopted it. Never could get the hang of it myself.
The writeup makes you think they are sucking memories out of the brain and capturing them to disk. Simply not true. There is nothing at all revolutionary about what they are doing. They are basically designing a sort of journal or ultimate blog. Non-computer related experiences must be fed in and probably commented on (photos, etc). Some computer experiences may be captured automatically (this wasn't very clear, the article was more hype than substance), but nothing too difficult. The 'revolutionary' part they are claiming is the organization and search engine, and maybe some of the computer-auto-capture stuff (again, I can't tell if this is a claim or just an example..). This is not worthy of a Slashdot story, its just another blog...
Now my wife can say "I'm going into JCPennys, I'll meet you in an hour", and I won't have to try and remember what she was wearing when I sneak up behind a brunette to pinch her butt!
"That was close honey, that chick's butt looks just like yours."
At least generally I can tell which one is her, by the three orbiting satellites.. (children)
"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."
Yes, let's junk our minds and rely on computers instead! After all, we all know that computers are exactly like human brains only better! Haha, I will now power up and defeat you with my powerfull... hands!..... I have no idea why I just said that. Likewise, I have no idea why this is inovative or impressive. People have been doing this for years.. with photos, diarys, letters and such. This, much as the artical says, is just a large database.
And frankly, I completely disagree with their premiss that having such accurate data on our past will give us a more true picture of what we were. We can only see the world through our own eyes, even if we have a perfect time line of what we *did* it still isn't likey to change how we'll think about our actions. We're still tainted by our own predjuices and momentary feelings and everything else, that relationship one had a year ago is still going to seem like a silly thing, and we're still going to say "oh, I wasn't really in love with her" even if we can see exactly what we did...
Besides, for the important things (well, what I consider important anyways, I'm sure as hell not going to suggest any of you need believe what I do) there's somthing to be said for just a memory. Sometimes a remembered smile between friends during a metor shower is more special than a video tape of the whole night.
Of course, that is assuming you are just treating the data as still frames, not taking advantage of using the similarities between frames to save space. Also, a great deal of time is spent sleeping, and unless you are recording dreams (which can be too abstract for video to record), that time can be cut, as well as blinking. Let's assume 1400 kbit/s (Mpeg4 coding looks acceptable to me at this rate for everything, on average would preserve more than you can remember at any rate...
redundant (Score:5, Funny)
Re:redundant (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Re:redundant (Score:3, Insightful)
There will never be criminals in the US ever again. What a country!
Re:redundant (Score:3, Interesting)
Correction.
There will never be innocents in the US ever again.
With this kind of information at their disposal anyone can be made to appear to be guilty of just about anything. Add secret trials and a general terror-hysteria to the mix and you get an environment that makes Orwell's vision almost pleasant by comparison.
Re:redundant (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
My car keys? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:My car keys? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:My car keys? (Score:5, Funny)
Results 1 - 10 of about 651,000. Search took 0.37 seconds.
Which one is it?
Parent
We've had these "surrogate brains" for millenia. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:We've had these "surrogate brains" for millenia (Score:3, Interesting)
They deteriorate if exposed to sunlight, water, or any number of bacteria, insects, and even mamals, that enjoy the taste of paper.
If I'm storing my data around goats, I'll take CDs over paper any day. For the same price as thousands of books, I can have inumerable CD copies.
Oh no (Score:4, Funny)
may be a crazy idea (Score:5, Insightful)
Just "protect" it with the DMCA (Score:3, Funny)
Simple.
Re:Just "protect" it with the DMCA (Score:3, Insightful)
And I do what with it? (Score:5, Interesting)
Seriously though, aside from being incredibly cool, what's the use of this thing? To pass on to relatives after you're gone? Nefarious use in our legal system? Coaster ("Don't put your drink on the table, use Aunt Jenny instead...")?
Re:And I do what with it? (Score:5, Funny)
(Where X was the last thing I would ever say/admit/believe.)
Be warned, women in high places will never alow this technology to be used by men, there is a potential for blokes in arguments to be proven right!
Parent
Re:And I do what with it? (Score:3, Funny)
Any male who gathers evidence preemptively to use against a female (unless she's an adversary) is just digging his own grave. Just roll over like you're supposed to; you'll be happier. You can know you're right all you want, just don't try to prove it.
Re:And I do what with it? (Score:3, Funny)
Yeah, right, and I drink becase of all the good memories beer enhances...
But. (Score:5, Funny)
Included in the title should be who is running it (Score:4, Insightful)
Anyone want to take bets on how fast MyLifeBits will be selling off your personal info? True if you doubt Microsoft's dubious motivation and believe they're working for the greater good, this still brings a new meaning to 'single point of failure'.
What do you need a DVD for? (Score:5, Funny)
Hmmm... (Score:2, Insightful)
I presume you must have to add stuff to this 'archive' manually? What happens if you forget? I know I probably would.
Heres a product i could use! (Score:2, Funny)
Woohoo! (Score:4, Funny)
I could get my folks to do Director's Commentary... ^_^
project is called MyLifeBits (Score:3, Informative)
Re:project is called MyLifeBits (Score:5, Funny)
That's cool. I'm about to start my own project, called MyLifeBites. It'll be a focus group helping nerdy Slashdotters come to grips with the fact that there's nothing in their lives worth backing up.
Parent
Well it sounds nice and all, but... (Score:2, Interesting)
Read the EULA (Score:5, Interesting)
Imagine... All the information submitted to the system becomes copyright of Organization X...
Or am I just being paranoid?
But I've aready got that. (Score:2, Interesting)
It's called encyclopidiac memory, all they need is a way to give everyone what some of us have naturally, and it's done. :-)
The lawyers will love this... (Score:5, Interesting)
The most reliable one! (Score:5, Funny)
Umm....Why do I feel that was one sarcastic comment in the article???
Screw That (Score:3, Funny)
Knunov
Someday is today, Microsoft owns our thoughts (Score:3, Funny)
We all knew it was going to happen someday, Microsoft would own our memories. Can you imagine the DCMA violations trying to break the compy protect to view your own memories? What type of lawsuits are we going to get into when we just claim to remember doing it, and no we didn't reference the MyLifeBits database?
The media would have fun with this. We could have "Truman Shows" playing back the MyLifeBits database files 24x7. Imagine the pirated copies of the next serial killer, or thrill seeker.
Don't you love technology.
DVD not mentioned in article. (Score:4, Informative)
There's talk about 1000gb harddiscs, but not DVDs.
One of the stupidest headlines on
As to the idea it self: why? I don't need to excatly what or how I said something to my friends or family. In fact I dont want to...
One good idea, that they don't mention, would be automatic transscription of the audio conversations, thrus making them searchable. Now, that would be nice...
Microsoft ... (Score:3, Informative)
- [...] engineers at Microsoft's Media Presence lab [...]
For those who can't be bothered to read the article (my advice: don't), a short summary: in a couple of years (like, five) 1-TB hard drives will cost ~USD300. A new trademark, "MyLifeBits", which is basically a (gasp) *searchable* database can be filled with everyPhotoYouEverTake, everySoundYouEverHear, everyTextYouEverRead (yadda yadda) as a kind of, er, diary. (For the yougsters: a "diary" is a private, dead-tree blog).No word on how you are supposed to get the information in there
What is this? MS anti-FUD?
(no, actually I'm having a *great* day)
Sorry but.... (Score:4, Funny)
Seriously?
Do the guys at Microsoft seriously consider the PC to be a most reliable of entities? Man, you think after years of running Windows you'd know better.
As for the database, that sounds like it would be an enormous amount of work to keep up, and wouldn't be that useful day to day unless you were carrying it with you. I forget to take pictures, how am I going to remember to upload the pictures I actually take? And has anyone ever gone back and reread their old email...BORING... unless you're narsisistic who cares what you posted on
This thing sounds good in theory, but in practice people just are not taking that many pictures or writing that many memorable letters. This will be a product for the vain, the famous and the rich who don't know what else to spend their money on.
------
Re:Sorry but.... (Score:3, Funny)
It would be self-limiting. Once you started on this project, you wouldn't be able to do more than a set amount per day, or it would take too long to enter into the database.
Monday - went to swell party after dinner, but had to leave at 10PM so I'd have time to enter into my database what a good time I was having before I left.
In the end, only people with no life would have time to put in their life.
Already done (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, it sounds obsessive compulsive, and maybe it is. I do it because I like to have my life backed up in case of household disaster. Also, I've found that having that data with me all the time is very helpful--I carry a floppy with it so I can open anything I'm working on and save it.
Another reason I do it (especially the log/database) is that I don't like the idea of not knowing about my own life. I found the days going by in a blur before I kept track of things.
The only drawback is that I'm relying more and more on this CD instead of memory, which may be reducing it.
Cameras and Miner's Hats... (Score:4, Interesting)
In the compliance lab I work in, anything we do needs to be documented to prove that it happened. We always joked that we need miner's helmets with little cameras attached that always film what we do. That's what this looks like...
What if i'm insane? (Score:4, Insightful)
Attacking the wrong problem (Score:3, Insightful)
And that's the problem: adding meaningful comments to all the little tidbits.
I have bought a digicam a little more than a year ago: I have taken approx 2000 pictures since that. I could put together some little scripts that search the JPEG's EXIF tags for comments but I can not be bothered to type it in. No way, that's not something I want to do. Easing/automatating this process is the thing that should be addressed (which is, I do realise, is far from trivial), but it's not dealt with.
Then I have all the emails I have ever sent or received (minus SPAM). Grepping it is something that is useful but it can be frustrating to remembering the exact words, then realizing that a synonym was used or there was a typo: so there is also space for improvement, but this project does not seems to address this problem.
So, to have the obligatory SP reference, this project seems to be supposed work like this:
1. Throw all the stuff you have into a database
2. ???
3. Have your whole life easily searchable
Pentagon (Score:3, Funny)
Dear diary (Score:3, Interesting)
Storage is easy, retrieval's a bitch. (Score:3)
Running a Google search engine on an ever growing mass of data data is not enough.
The data has to be corelated. The engine has to understand, (read that word again, understand, an AI problem,) what its looking at and the appropriate level of granularity to use when parsing the data when extracting the memes it contains.
Our computers are damn near deaf, dumb, blind and stupider than cockroackes and we're having systemic, Korzibskian semantic anomalies and pattern recognition failures as it is.
I'd be happy when one has the information processing capacity of an annoying Pomeranian. It'll be about as useful too but I'd be happy.
Farleyfile and Lifesigns (Score:4, Informative)
Hmmm, sounds like the Farleyfile.
(copied from Jerry Pournelle's page [jerrypournelle.com]): Big Jim Farley was a New York Tammany Hall politician whose success was partly due to the "Farleyfile": a collection of facts about everyone he ever met. If you went to see Big Jim, by the time you got into his office he knew your name, your birthday, the names of your spouse and children, and what you liked for lunch. It was all on file.
Also, there's a program (Lifesigns?) that's based around a chronological history of data (there's a PC version, and there was a Newton version). You don't go searching for "Letter about Enron", you remember that it was 7 or 8 months ago, and look at email then. Clever premise, loved by all the people who adopted it. Never could get the hang of it myself.
Read the article before repeating the hype... (Score:5, Insightful)
EXCELLENT For Husbands! Is it portable? (Score:3, Funny)
"That was close honey, that chick's butt looks just like yours."
At least generally I can tell which one is her, by the three orbiting satellites.. (children)
I think... (Score:3, Funny)
This reminds me of the scrapbook UCB episode... (Score:3, Insightful)
"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."
Yes, let's junk our minds and rely on computers instead! After all, we all know that computers are exactly like human brains only better! Haha, I will now power up and defeat you with my powerfull... hands!..
I have no idea why I just said that.
Likewise, I have no idea why this is inovative or impressive. People have been doing this for years.. with photos, diarys, letters and such. This, much as the artical says, is just a large database.
And frankly, I completely disagree with their premiss that having such accurate data on our past will give us a more true picture of what we were. We can only see the world through our own eyes, even if we have a perfect time line of what we *did* it still isn't likey to change how we'll think about our actions. We're still tainted by our own predjuices and momentary feelings and everything else, that relationship one had a year ago is still going to seem like a silly thing, and we're still going to say "oh, I wasn't really in love with her" even if we can see exactly what we did...
Besides, for the important things (well, what I consider important anyways, I'm sure as hell not going to suggest any of you need believe what I do) there's somthing to be said for just a memory. Sometimes a remembered smile between friends during a metor shower is more special than a video tape of the whole night.
Re:Another idea... (Score:4, Interesting)
1400*60=100320kbit/min
*60=6,019,200 kbit/hour
*24=144,460,800kbit/day
*365.25=52,76
*60=3,165,858,000,000kbit
=~360 TB
So to record 60 years of concious, non-blinking time at 1400kbps, you just need 1024 disk arrays like I have at my house...
Parent