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>> Hey, everyone. Welcome to today's Authors at Google talk.
I'm pleased to introduce Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell.
They're the authors of Total Recall, which is coming out this week I believe -- last
week -- Oh, congratulations. It details their decade-long experiment with
recording as many waking moments of Gordon's life as possible.
This is happening at Microsoft Research. It's called "My Life Bits".
And we're looking forward to having them tell us more.
So, please join me in welcoming Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell.
>> [Clapping]
Gordon Bell: I'm losing my mind and so is everybody else.
As you age, it's a phenomena of just getting a little bit older.
And we use things like this to remember where you parked or anything you can -- lists, grocery
lists, whatever, are ways of dealing with this.
What we're speculating is, What if you could remember everything?
And, What are the tools that you need to do that?
So it's really, everything you've ever read, everything you've ever seen, and everything
you've ever heard. So that really became the mantra of the project
that we did. This was a quote by Bill Gates in the 1995
book that he wrote. And then, as we got into the project, we found
there's just much more to just beyond 'what you heard and seen', but it was all of the
ambience around you -- that is everything from, especially location, on through your
total environment. And centers are everywhere.
So if you want, you can have total recall when you have all of that and can get access
to it. And as we all recall, there are three reasons
-- or three technologies -- that are driving this.
One is simply the ability -- we can record it.
There are devices out there -- the digital camera probably being the most important bit
-- that has caused everybody to need to do it.
In addition, there are more and more devices all of the time being put on us.
And including especially all of the cameras, the various cameras, particularly the new
Apple nano iPhone. And then, storage -- the second component
-- namely, that it's abundant and cheap. You know, it's enabling our companies to do
the amazing things that we can do by being able to store everything.
And then, finally, as you guys know, the issue is You've got to be able to get it back.
So, search is a key part of being able to deal with the recall.
So we believe total recall is inevitable. And Jim is going to talk about some of the
details.
Jim Gemmell: Thanks, Gordon. So we do believe total recall is inevitable.
And in the book, we're talking about not just our experience with My Life Bits, but about
what's possible. And we try to write it in a way accessible
to the layperson and get the general public excited about what this could mean for their
lives. And also to get people to see the business
opportunities here -- that there's going to be a building demand in the general public
to do something with all this data I'm churning out -- to take advantage of it.
So Total Recall starts today. It's already taking off.
And we're going to see within ten years, it's should be full-blown, something that's already
shaking our society. Now, to be clear what we're not talking about
is, 'Life Blogging.' Of course, there's people out there like the Jennycam and all these
different sites where people are putting their whole life on the web.
And, if you like doing that, go ahead. We think it's kind of crazy -- risky.
We don't do it. What we're more like is these diaries with
the locks on them. It's my stuff.
I want to keep it. I want to keep it safe.
It's for my benefit. So let me tell you a little bit about our
experience and how we got into this. It started in 1999.
We were actually working on telepresence, and Gordon, wanting to be a good teleworker
said, "I can't drag my filing cabinets around with me everywhere.”
So he started scanning all his paper. And then we said, "Well, why just paper?
What if you digitize everything you possibly could and put it on your hard drive?”
At the time -- it was about 2001 by now -- and we were saying, "Gee.
We'll all have terabytes by about 2007. What could we stick on those things?”
And we said, "Well, we could keep all our e-mail and we could record every web page
we see and we could scan a bunch of paper every day and roll audio for eight hours and
take ten photos and it would take us five years to fill up our 80-gig drives, and by
then, we'll have terabyte drives that will last us another 65 years.”
So at that point, we were like, "Wow! A whole life on a terabyte."
Now, mind you, since then, our expectations have gone way up.
So ten photos a day isn't enough anymore, nor is that amount of audio and so on.
But, we call this now "20th century resolution.” So this would have impressed anybody in the
20th century if they actually had this much of their life -- and you could put that on
a terabyte. So off goes Gordon to become IM data, pulling
paintings and posters down off the walls, scanning metals which turn out to go really
nice on a scanner instead of trying to get the lighting just so with a camera.
Old home videos, notebooks. Here's the memo proposing the VAX architecture,
all kinds of goodies go into that big collection. And it ends up with a whole bunch of stuff.
So if we count the number of items: There's a lot of e-mails, there's a lot of pictures,
there's a lot of web pages. But if you go by space, video, audio, and
pictures dominate. And relatively speaking, Gordon doesn't even
have that much video. So really, the picture we ended up with is,
In the future it's, "We've got all our video.” And, "Oh yeah, we've got that little blip
of the other stuff.” You know, probably audio and pictures are
in the story there too, but the dominance of media there.
So now he's got it. What can he do with it?
Can you ever find anything? Can you organize anything?
Once you find it, would you know what it is? Gordon pulled up some photos, and he goes,
"Wow. Great picture. I have no idea what that's a picture of.”
And if you found it once, could you find it again?
So eventually, Gordon wanders into my office grumbling,
"Agh, it's all just a bunch of bits. I can't do anything with this.”
Our boss, Jim Gray, asked us, "Have you guys invented the 'write once/read never' memory?”
So with encouragement like that, I got involved and started building a system, putting everything
in a database. And started to build up a suite of applications
that would record everything we could, beginning with sucking in our files, having somewhere
to search and browse, adding comments with text or by speaking, capturing a copy of every
web page we see -- not just the URL, but the actual page -- recording our instant messenger
chats, sucking in our e-mails, recording telephone. Gordon's office was set up to say, "Recording."
That's the first thing you hear when you call, so the California law is satisfied and you
can opt out and hang up if you want. We played with recording TV and radio.
In the end, we thought, It's not so interesting to keep copies of all the shows, because we
believe everything will be on-demand eventually. But what is interesting is to keep a log of
what you're watching and when you watched it.
Screensavers are perhaps the killer ap, once you have so much stuff you can't even remember
you have it all to go look for it. And so, something needs to just bring it up
by random and let you enjoy the stuff. And when it's there, you have to capture the
moment and be able to rate things and comment on them.
GPS, Sensecam -- we'll talk about in a moment -- and finally "gooey logging" where we were
recording everything that goes on, on our desktops and what we're doing with our PCs.
I'm wearing a Sensecam here. This is invented by Lyndsay Williams who used
to be in our Cambridge lab. And what it is, is a camera that's designed
to take pictures automatically at a quote/unquote "good time.”
So it has a light-level sensor and if I walk out this room to outdoors in the sunshine,
it'll notice the light levels change -- let's say, "Something's different.
Let's take a picture of it.” It has a passive, infrared sensor like a burglar
alarm. And so, if it detects a warm body, it says,
"Oh, there's a person in front of you. Take a picture.”
It has accelerometers, so if it's jiggling around, it'll say, "Let's wait to take that
picture so I don't get a blurry one.” Here's Gordon armed with Sensecam and Voice
Recorder, his standard issue equipment. And here's putting things together in time-lapse
video of a friend riding around in Cambridge, England.
You see the -- condense your day, and see a quick overview of what you were doing.
Great for vacations. The other thing that happens is, when you
automatically capture, you get moments that you'd never otherwise capture.
I have here -- these are some of my favorite Sensecam moments.
The top is a sequence of having lunch with Peter Hart, who heads the Ricoh Innovations.
And he has these very vivid gestures and so on.
There's no way I could kind of capture that feeling of having lunch with Peter apart from
doing something like this. Or on the right, I have the moment that I
first ever met Ben Shneiderman, the user interface guru.
And that's him walking up and reaching out to shake my hand.
And I would never have pulled the camera out and snapped that, but I've got it.
And a number of other special moments. One is bumping into a colleague by accident
at a hotel check-in desk. There's a fellow named Cathal Gurrin at Dublin
City University, who decided to wear a Sensecam constantly for a year, you know, every waking
moment. He thought, "This would be a crazy experiment.
And when it's all over, I want to throw that thing away.”
But, actually, when the year ended, he wouldn't give it back.
And he's still wearing it today. I think he had about 800,000 photos in the
first year and he's up to several million by now.
But anyhow, Cathal said to me that he captured the moment where he first met his girlfriend.
But, of course, he didn't know that she would become his girlfriend.
So these are the kind of moments we get when we have automatic capture.
And instead of being the typical story of, you know, the parent takes a lot of photos
of the first child, and then a little less on the second child, and it goes down --
because you actually want to live -- you don't want to just be the cameraman.
And then the fourth child has to go to therapy for, "Why didn't Daddy love me?”
This way, you get to capture it and enjoy what you're doing.
So capturing where you walk, recording your meetings.
This is tracking what's going on, on a PC -- so showing hour by hour how much is the
PC usage and what are the top programs being used, the files being accessed.
So, in the end, My Life Bits isn't a product. It's just a proof of concept.
And in fact, it's a suite of applications, as I explained.
And we also started a larger research community with the CARP-A research group and we funded
14 universities and gave them our software and Sensecams.
And they did a bunch of wonderful work and came up with all kinds of things we could
have never thought of. I like to boast on their work a bit, and I'll
show a bit of it later on. But we got enough of a picture to say,
"Look. We see where we're headed here, and we know that we really want it.
We think it's very compelling.” So now, I want to tell you some of the benefits
of Total Recall. I don't have time to get into all of them,
but let me do a few. I'll talk about memory and health and life
and afterlife. And here -- this picture is just to give you
a flavor of one thing which is, Total Recall gets rid of clutter.
That was one thing we didn't quite appreciate until after you scan stuff and toss it out,
it's like, "Wow. I had a huge filing cabinet I could get rid
of.” And all this junk and stuff on your shelves
says good-bye. So it's a very liberating kind of feeling.
Memory. Human memory has all kinds of problems -- from losing memories over time, assigning
memories to the wrong source, bias, people -- this is why they find problems with witnesses
in court cases. They end up reciting things they read in the
newspaper and believing that that's what they saw.
Absentmindedness. You actually do remember it, but you just didn't remember it when you
really needed to remember it. And you get home from the grocery store and
you're kicking yourself that, yet again, you did not buy the kitty litter, or whatever.
And it's on the tip of your tongue; you can't bring it back.
Those are just some examples of the problems of human memory.
But of course, our e-memories are cold, hard, objective.
They never get bored. They record all the tedium down to the last
drop. And I just want to show you a few interfaces
of the feeling of having more of your memory online.
This is an interface done by Greg Smith in a _______ lab.
And saying, Okay, here's all Gordon's stuff. And he wants to look at "What do I have for
last year?” So it's going to re-factor this to show what's
available in the past year. Let's say, "Well, okay.
What do I have from Florida of last year?” Let's drill in on location and narrow down
to Florida. Now you see, "Oh, yeah.
There's the stuff from Florida of last year. But maybe I don't want just last year.
Well, what's everything for Florida?” Let's drop that restriction.
And I had to make this small for the little video capture I wanted to have it on, but
here's the same interface on 18 LCD panels. And this is, I think, where we're headed.
You know, large displays, and seeing the vista of our life laid out and being able to browse
it and gain insights and see patterns in ways we never have before, and just enjoy it.
You know, when this is your -- it's hard for me to describe.
A lot of the things that we do, when it's not your stuff, you go, "Oh, that's kind of
interesting.” I remember one prototype I came in with and
I went, "This is amazing. Look! It's automatically detecting such and
such," and the guy in the next office goes, "Eh, big deal.”
And then he did it on his stuff, and he comes running back into my -- "Wow! That's really
cool!" you know, when it's his stuff. And when that's your life, it's amazing.
You know, here's another example of working with memory.
I had an instance where there'd been an e-mail discussion about storage, and I remember that
that guy said that really cool thing. I want to look that up.
So I wasn't too good on search terms, but doing a search for 'storage' got me down to
only 5500 e-mails. But by looking at the attributes that we had,
looking at the Who sent the mail? And having it sorted by frequency, I was able
to spot a name that I recognized and get to it.
Or if you're recording -- you're logging your phone calls and you know what's going on with
your phone calls -- now, let's say Gordon has a discussion with his real estate agent
while he's selling his house, and she says, "Look at this comparable property.
Bring up this web page.” And he looks at it and they talk about it
and he hangs up. And now a week passes, two weeks, three weeks
pass, and he says, "Oh, I want to go back and check out that comparable property again.”
What's he going to search for? 'House'? 'Real estate'?
He'll get all these different pages he looked at.
But instead, he starts with, "Well, I know who my real estate agent is, and Let's take
the phone call with her and say, What happened at the same time as that phone call?"
And then, when he does that, not too much actually happened during the phone call.
And we have a copy of the page, which probably isn't on the web anymore because the house
is already sold, but we can get back to it. So by bringing all these different things
together from our life, we're able to hop from item to item, use correlations between
them to start with your little memory hook and get to what you need to find.
Now, let's talk about health and how Total Recall will impact health.
I visited Gordon at the hospital. He was just recovering from bypass surgery.
The doctor came into the room and said, "Oh, let's check you out.”
And he opened up his robe and looked at his chest, and he says, "Yeah.
Oh, it's looking a bit better, I think. All right. Well, looks good.
You should be able to get out this weekend.” And he leaves the room.
I said, "What's that all about?” Gordon says, "Well, I want to go home this
weekend. It's my birthday.
But they're worried that this rash on my chest is a sign of infection.
And they won't let me out if it's not getting better.”
I said, "Oh, well, it's good that it's getting better then.”
He says, "No, it's not getting better.” I said, "Well, how do you know that?”
He says, "Well, because I've got my digital camera out, been taking a picture of it every
day. And so, I know that, in fact, it's not getting
better at all, but the doctor believes it's getting better, so that's good enough.”
And so, Gordon actually got to go home that weekend and fortunately, it didn't turn out
to be a scary infection. But this is -- the nature of our health --
so much of it is subjective right now or depends on our memory.
"When did he start feeling crummy?” "Oh, I think it looks a bit better." or
"How long have you had this fever? I don't know, maybe since Tuesday.”
We want to change all that. Starting with our health records -- even though
patients' charts are available nearly all the time, most visits have problems with missing
information. RAND thinks the U.S. could save 77 billion
each year from adopting electronic health records.
And there's estimates that it could also save as many as 100,000 lives every year.
Clearly, our paper-based records aren't cutting it right now.
We believe in health records "By the individual/For the individual.”
They're yours; you should have them. The problem is just bringing them all together,
because some are at the G.P., some are at the hospital, some are at the specialist's,
some are at the lab -- they're all over the place.
Let's bring them all into one place where we can take advantage of them.
And Gordon's actually done this -- gone and collected all his records and digitized them
and has them available. This is an interface from University of Pittsburg
called My Health Bits, looking at what it would be like to try and have something to
manage all that yourself. Then, let's go a step further.
Besides the records that already exist, let's start keeping new records.
Philips is already selling these devices that are wirelessly or wired transmitting data
to a hub that can forward it up to the web and to your doctor or wherever you want it
to go. So there's a scale; there's a blood pressure
cuff. The lady in the picture there has a oxygen
level -- oximeter, I think they call it -- on her finger to check the blood oxygen level.
And there's a glucose meter there, I think -- is one of those.
So these are already on the market. Gordon and I are both wearing these Bodybuggs
-- so now we're talking about wearables where you're tracking the calories that you burn
and the number of steps that you take, and there's lots of fitness products along that
line. We'll see more and more wearables tracking
more and more values. And eventually, we'll get into "smart materials"
where it's just in our clothing, in our shoes, in our shirts.
And it'll just be -- I saw some other work, also at Dublin City University, with the fabrics
that are checking the pH in your sweat and noting when you're dehydrated, or even checking
on your posture through your shirt. Eventually, we reach the final frontier here
of health sensing, which is in-body. You know, swallowing cameras, having wireless
pressure sensors in your aneurysm sac that are wirelessly telling what the pressure is
to the outside. Eventually, we'll have things crawling around
in our bloodstreams and reporting on how things are looking.
And what's the payoff? Well, we talked about this -- the doctor saying,
"When did he start feeling this way?” Instead of me saying, "Gee, I'm not really
sure.” No, I want to walk in, "Here's the log of
my blood pressure. Here's the graph of my temperature.
Here's the heart data." Incentives. It turns out there's a big problem with people
taking medications -- except painkillers, which have their own potent motivator.
But everything else, people are pretty bad at.
But it turns out there's a number study showing it can be really helpful if you can see, you
know, some value -- your blood pressure actually going down as you're taking your medication.
Then you're more likely to take your medication. It can help out.
We could do data mining on this and discover correlations.
And find out the things that you're doing that tend to lead to being sick.
Or we could have even proactive advice -- something kicking in and saying, "Hey, you
know what? You haven't been getting enough sleep.
You better take some extra vitamin C.” Or whatever your electronic nurse wants to
advise you. And if we anonymize some of this data, we
can start getting involved in studies on a scale hard to imagine before.
I spoke with someone at Xerox Park yesterday who had done some early work at expert systems
taking data and mining it and came up with publishable medical results showing drug side
effects. And he said, "Wow! This would be incredible,
you know? It was so expensive and hard for us to even
study a few thousand people. With this, if people felt safe with the steps
to anonymize, we could do studies much faster, much larger, and mine things for new results.”
Let's talk now about your every day life and your afterlife.
What do e-memories do for that? I overheard a woman in a restaurant -- an
older lady -- saying, "I'm going to give you my cell phone number.
You can't leave messages on my home phone, because I've saved too many from my grandson.”
And she just loaded up the old home answering machine and that was it.
And what does she want? Not just the transcript of what her grandson
said. She wants to hear his voice.
It's very precious to her. And there's a real special quality to the
kind of media that people are going to want to collect -- much richer story telling that
we get from it. And there's another effect that we hadn't
quite realized is that, by digitizing everything -- while most of my physical mementos used
to sit in the attic or in a shoebox somewhere, or maybe even in a really nice photo album,
but it's tucked away and it only comes out every few years, now they're on screensavers
and of course, we're getting more and more of these little photo stand kind of displays
that can sit on your end table and more and more displays everywhere.
And now, we're just enjoying them more. They come out of the dust and onto our living
rooms. Here's a shot -- a timeline -- of pictures
of Gordon's son. And down at the bottom is the distribution
in time of the photos, which didn't say anything to me, but Gordon said, "Oh, yeah.
I see. Well, they drop off here because Brigham went
to college then. And then, there's a few spikes -- those are
family events. And at the end, there's another burst and
that's when the grandkids arrived.” So to Gordon, even the data distribution tells
a story. Of course, your location tells a story.
Here's where I went on a trip to Los Angeles with my kids, and I was taking my boys to
some hockey games. And here's the GPS of everywhere I went.
And the photos that I took. And then, I could re-segment by time and I
could pick a particular trip here and animate driving back up to the hotel.
And I got home and saw this -- once I sucked into the PC -- and I had my calendar also
with all the games we were going to, and I went, "Wow.
I have enough here. If someone could just package this up, I could
just send it to my mom, and she'd have the story of what the grandkids did this weekend,
which she's dying to hear, but I would never do the work to do.”
So we got an intern in doing automatic blogging based on this and did some cool versions of
automatically telling the stories of your little episodes in your life.
Going even further, if you're wearing one of these Sensecams, you easily get several
thousand photos a day. How do you tell that story?
Dublin City University has a wonderful prototype of this of working on event segmentation of
those images and then looking for faces trying to find similar faces, looking at what people
are wearing and How does that change? Looking at changes in the accelerometer to get an
idea of activity changes, looking at your GPS and where you are.
And then, based on that, they can say, "Well, you're in the usual place with the usual kind
of faces and clothing, you know. No big deal." Or else they can tell, "You're
doing something out of the ordinary.” And so, then, they bring up this 'visual diary',
as they call it, that makes the "out of the ordinary" things -- more novel things --
big. And shrinks down the stuff that's likely boring
and you've done it a zillion times. And in there is, If you mouse over it, you
see that stop motion/playback of your life. So automatic summarization, telling the story
of your day just based on shooting thousands of photos as you go.
In the end, once we have all this stuff, what do we pass on to the next generation?
Ed Feigenbaum was called the "Father of expert systems.”
I got to have lunch with him one day, and he drew this on a napkin -- he said, "Here's
how we thought things would be when we started working on expert systems.
We have this logic module, we have this data module, and, you know, we go to town.”
But he said, "Years and years of experience showed us that the picture looks more like
this: Lots and lots and lots of data and really less logic as you often better.”
Well, when we get to e-memories, we got lots and lots and lots of data to bring you.
You know, based on just what Einstein left behind, Carnegie Mellon did an interactive
system where you could ask Einstein questions. And if it was stuff published about him, he
could virtually answer you. MyCyberTwin.com went through the Simpsons
transcripts and allow you to chat with Bart Simpson.
And sounds a lot like Bart. And when you say, "Do you have a pet?”
He can say, "Who needs a pet when I have Homer?” And actually, by that, he does actually answer
who his dog is. Now, but this data is trivial compared to
what Gordon's recording is like. And actually, what Gordon's got -- he's missed
most of his life already. When we look at what the next generation will
have -- we'll have an incredible corpus of their usual phrases, what happened to them.
We'll be able to really use their kind of expressions and simulate a person to have
a little taste of digital immortality. Total Recall will be a revolution.
It's going to shake up our society. Just like previous things that we call revolutions,
like the Industrial Revolution or the PC Revolution. It's going to mean we live differently, and
we're going to have to deal with it. We see that some of it we think there's problems.
There will be bugs to be fixed. And then, there's some things that are just
going to be changes. Just like the fact that we have vastly greater
transportation today means we can get fresh fruit from the other side of the world.
Things are just different. Or that we can commute long distance in cars.
One bug that we're going to have to deal with is 'data decay', where -- here's a little
flight of fancy by Gordon of Data writing to its application, "Dear Appy, I thought
we had a commitment. You were going to support me forever, but
now you've abandoned me. Where are you?”
You know? You had this wonderful format and you stored something in it and now there's
no ap to play it back in anymore. I think there's going to be -- you know, another
thing is outright data loss. So backup and replication is going to become
a service that's much more mainstream than it even is today and in much more demand.
And that, coupled with that will be a service to roll forward formats, to keep them current,
or to warn people, "You're in a kind of fringe format.
That's risky. There's only, you know, ten of you in the
world using that thing. It might be gone pretty easily.
Gordon and I put the ACM'97, 50th anniversary meeting on the web.
And it didn't take that many years before we got an e-mail saying, "I can't play one
of the videos.” So I contacted the Window's media team.
I said, "Guys, c'mon. Let's get this Kodak posted.
We've got to play this video.” A few days later, they replied and said, "Well,
we had a license to play that. The company that owned the license went bankrupt;
it's in receivership. There's no one to go to, to get a new license.
And for us to release the Kodak would be breaking the law.”
So, I mean, there's a totally dead format. So we have to watch out for that.
How about privacy? What will this do to our privacy?
We're going to have to develop etiquette in our society about, When is it acceptable to
record each other? And laws that deal with that even.
But already, we have to grapple with privacy. Already you may be posted on DontDateHimGirl.com
with warnings of what a jerk you are. Or of course, we all know about embarrassing
videos on YouTube and pictures and whatnot. Steve Mann does a funny experiment where he
and a bunch of people wear these T-shirts that say, "For your protection, you may be
recorded and all criminal acts prosecuted.” To try to kind of echo the words we see on
surveillance cams. And they wander around with these things and
watch people in stores and various museums and various places panic.
And they get a big kick out of that. And it turns out you don't even need to have
a camera to make people upset, because it's the mere possibility that you might be recorded
that's going to change your behavior or make you worry.
And in a way, we're already there. Already recording is so miniaturized that
you might be recorded and you don't even know it.
And so, some of this isn't so much even what we're advocating people do.
You know, we're not telling you, you ought to record video and audio 24/7.
We're telling you that more and more e-memories will have more and more benefits.
But even without us saying anything -- even if the book didn't exist, we weren't advocating
anything, there's already -- we're hitting a point where society has to grapple with,
What does it mean that I might be recorded? Then there's the legal side of things.
Will my e-memories testify against me? So one idea is, "Maybe I could just get some
of them wrong on purpose. If I put in some junk in there that's false
then that won't be any good in court." Some of the people at USC were working on that
idea but then some lawyers had told them, "No, that's not going to cut it.”
Could we change the law? We think the law probably should change.
There's been some interesting rulings lately. One judge said that a man didn't have to give
an encryption key to the cops. He said, "No. That's testifying against himself.
More like that.” So that's a very interesting ruling, and we'll
see how that holds up. In another case, a judge ruled that, "Well,
okay. If you do have to hand it over, the standards
should be higher. It should be more like having a strip search
than just having to hand over some papers." So recognizing, This is more intimate than
kind of maybe your typical paperwork. And we think really, it's an extension of
your brain, and it should be given that kind of legal protection.
I'd like to put all my memories in a Swiss databank.
So just like a Swiss bank hides money, and it's plausibly deniable, and no one knows
it's there. That's where I want to stash all my memories.
I want someone to store it for me. I'd like to have a second password, which
is the "I'm compromised" password, where I log in and it goes off and it shreds all the
nasty stuff. So, we were doing all this recording and I've
been doing quite a lot of it myself too. And I thought, "Well, this is kind of fun.
It's kind of a novelty.” And in particular recording every web page
that I visited. And then, here's a timeline of some of my
web pages from 2003 -- I think it is -- and there's a gap in the middle there, which is
where my harddrive crashed and I hadn't backed up for four months.
And that day, I had an epiphany. I went from going, "Oh, this is a novelty.”
To going, "Oh, no! I'm really upset that I lost a bunch of my memories.”
Was the way I thought of it. It was very distressing to me.
And I found that after that, I would go looking for things, expecting them to be there and
they weren't. They'd be lost.
And it dawned on me, "Well, this isn't just fun and games. I count on it.
I rely on the fact that, if I've seen a web page, I've got it forever.”
And that it actually is life-changing. We talk about the era before humans did any
writing as 'pre-history'. It's almost like it doesn't count -- wasn't
in the record. Well, I think soon, we'll talk about pre-Total
Recall. We'll talk about those people back before
when all you had was a few shoeboxes and a bunch of papers, and you're lucky if you left
that behind. That really, the e-memory revolution is going
to change up everything and really make us live different lives.
Thanks.
>> [Clapping]
Jim Gemmell: So I guess we have time for some questions?
Q [inaudible]
Jim Gemmell: Well, you still do have to remember. That's a great question, you know.
Apparently Plato was concerned about this in terms of writing.
He said, "Oh, no. Our memories are going to go to hell now, because you guys are writing
stuff down. What a terrible idea writing is.” Ironically, we know this because it was written
down. But it's the same thing here.
My mind is still full to overflowing of things that I have to memorize.
The difference is, What do I memorize? So I'm not memorizing phone numbers anymore
-- they're on my cell phone. Or I'm not memorizing things that I know I
can look up quickly in my system in a few seconds.
But there's still things that you want on the tip of your tongue.
You want to be able to say right away without even a five-second lookup.
And there always will be. So I hope it just frees us up to think different
things.
Q Reinforcing your point. Plato was nothing compared to Pythagoras,
Buddha, Jesus, the whole Celtic Druids, all the great spiritual feelings that basically
never wrote down a single word, forbade their disciples from ever writing down a single
word. Of course the disciples disobeyed, which is
why we know anything about all of them. But because of that -- the written word is
a dead word. But I found it particularly interesting that
you picked the Swiss databank example when, less than a month ago, a Swiss bank just agreed
to give all the secret data on tens of thousands of U.S. taxpayers -- or rather, not quite
fully taxpayers -- to the U.S. government.
And beyond the Fifth Amendment, the Fifth Amendment has never been applied to nonphysical
individuals, as opposed to other provisions of constitutional law.
As Microsoft knows well, and basically everybody, the more you put in e-mail -- the closest
thing we have to Total Recall today -- the more toast you are whenever anybody sues you.
So, how can any company support any recording at all going on inside their buildings when
it can be definitely subpoenaed and used against them in court, because there is no Fifth Amendment?
Jim Gemmell: Do you want to do this one?
Gordon Bell: Yeah. I know that's -- certainly the corporate view is to get rid of everything.
I don't know what it is here. I know Intel -- I've done some consulting
for awhile at Intel, and they're probably one of the strongest in terms of cleaning
out everything. Now, the beauty of doing that, it lets you
reinvent things every few years. But I subscribe to -- that you're going to
win more than you lose when you are able to have a long record.
And so, but I can't support it. It's just a belief that I have.
Jim Gemmell: You know, also, I think -- isn't this a great challenge for Google?
I mean, when I think of storing things in Gmail, you guys need to come up with a system
where you can't give it over to the government. You never see anything but it's encrypted,
as I said, where there's escape passwords that shreds stuff for you.
There's a lot of innovation left to do here. And I sure hope people here at Google jump
all over it and deliver some new ideas that are different than that Swiss databank that
we just talked about.
Q There are a couple of situations where it's either clearly illegal or it's of dubious
legality to photograph. And I'm thinking of situations like riding
the subway in New York or going to watch a movie.
Or there have been a lot of incidents lately about people videotaping law enforcement actions.
How do you make this kind of recording consistent with that kind of uncertain legal environment?
Gordon Bell: I think the laws are going to determine that.
You know, as technologists, we'll be providing the fodder for the creation and the definition
of the laws. But all we can do is observe that they are
-- either we're creating them or our friends or you are -- we're all together here creating
these kinds of opportunities with the technology. And, as you go there, we'll hit these boundaries
and then those boundaries will determine them. Each state, each country determines them quite
differently. So you just have to be aware when you go into
a country. For example, I spend a fair amount of time
in Sydney, and even photographing some of the public buildings -- if it's going to be
for a commercial use, Sydney expects you to pay for a picture of the Opera House if it's
going to be some money-making venture. In fact, that's why we had a very subdued
music with this, because we regard that as fair use, but when it's played on YouTube,
of course -- and you're helping define all of those, by the way.
YouTube helps define what's fair use.
Jim Gemmell: I think the other aspect is, Gordon talked about use for commercial use.
We're talking about a lot of things here that will be recorded and no one else will ever
see. And a lot of laws -- it'll be one thing to
have a law forbidding recording -- where the rubber really meets the road is whether you
share it with anybody. And so, you know, sometimes I wonder whether
people will obey these laws any more than they obey posted speed limits where they know
no cops are around. I think there's going to be a lot of working
out -- a lot of it, I think, is cultural as much as legal.
Will there be a special bond between people who don't record?
Or will there be a special bond if I trust you to record everything?
Or How will it work out, you know? And laws will change -- different countries,
as Gordon says.
Gordon Bell: As we were writing the book -- there's a book out there by a woman who
basically has a two-way, associative, videocamera built into her brain.
I mean, she has a hard time living with herself, because these images are constantly there.
But she can retrieve any bit by day or she can retrieve by image.
So in a way, she is a walking, absolute video -- the ultimate of what we expect.
So if you hired her to be part of something, why, you basically are getting a recorder
of this capability.
Q So, just to follow up on that previous question. Do you record any audio conversations other
than the ones on the phone? Like any face-to-face conversations?
Gordon Bell: Very rarely. I record a few. I've got an audio recorder.
I'm not recording this, because it was captured. I happen to be a strong believer in recording
meetings -- audio recording of meetings, in particular -- so you can go back and find
out what they have. In fact, I helped fund one company -- and
I'm not exactly sure where they are at this point -- a company called Quindy that has
audio and video capture of meetings.
Q This kind of avoids the issue of the previous question with regard to wiretapping conversations.
I mean, I heard you kind of talk about the future changes in the law in response to the
previous question. But what do you guys personally do yourselves
now? Do you actually go around and pay attention
to the laws of What things you're not allowed to photograph, and turn off your things?
I mean, practically, are you just assuming you're probably going to be fined?
You know, It's like five miles an hour over the speed limit.
Or are you paying careful attention to the exactly where you are and what the law is
there and what you are not allowed to photograph and when you need to -- I mean, it seems like
a hard work, right?
Gordon Bell: I think we're okay.
Jim Gemmell: For the record, I put it in my pocket when I walked past the big sign in
the hallway here that had your secret sauce on it.
Gordon Bell: And I turned mine over, so.
Jim Gemmell: But actually a lot of laws are fairly lenient with picture-taking, especially
in public places. For your own use, it's fair game.
It's the audio gets really, really sensitive where there's this presumption of privacy.
And also, that's more natural in a way, if you will.
Like, when we're out with people and you see cameras around, we kind of -- that's normative
here -- in this country, anyhow. But when you record audio, people are more
sensitive, and we tend to let them know, "Okay, is it okay if I record this conversation or
this meeting or whatever we're in?"
Gordon Bell: I do record some phone conversations periodically.
I tell the people -- I had a long, long CNN interview, and the guy said, "I'm recording
this.” And I said, "Okay, I'm going to record it
too.” Because it turned out there were a lot of
interesting sort of questions from the interview.
Q One of you talks about the emotional value of memories that will never go away.
In other words, wouldn't _____ be a little bit different from what it used to be?
Jim Gemmell: Yeah. So even there's memories that -- usually people say even "Well, there's
bad memories that I want to forget, and Isn't it more healthy for me to forget things?"
And what that misses is, there's a wonderful distinction between electronic memory and
human memory -- that with human memory, when people say, "Oh, I really ought to forget
that.” What they really mean is, "I really ought
to stop recalling it.” It's not that they have it in their memory,
but they're having flashbacks of the war, or they're having, you know, they can't stop
dwelling on that fight they had with their girlfriend or what have you.
And with an e-memory, we can do that. You can say, "Okay, seal this off.
Not for access unless I give the key.” Or however you want to do it.
Just hide it away. So there is a difference there, in terms of,
we can keep things that maybe later -- maybe years down the road -- you'll be really glad
you had or might be useful. We had one lady call in and say, "Oh, I had
a son who was bipolar, and the memories of his childhood are just horrible.
And I would hate to think of having kept them.” But, actually, if you think about it.
Yeah, she probably wants to lock them down and she doesn't want them bothering her, but
maybe when that kid is 25, that might be incredibly valuable stuff for his therapist.
So you never know.
Q And another related one is, Even for the good memories, we sometimes see more value
in them when we haven't seen them for awhile. As opposed to say, if you had pictures of
your child all around you all the time. Wouldn't you kind of get bored and not be
as happy about them as if you could see them every five years or whatever?
Gordon Bell: Having some kind of ranking, particularly when it's sort of memory refresh,
we almost like that it's like dynamic RAM, that you're periodically looking at that,
and those things are coming into your memory. And we have a control so that you can say,
"Well, that's not so important.” But what you want to do is really be able
to have a kind of a quality threshold of all of these -- of that, you know, when it's in
screensaver mode.
Jim Gemmell: Yeah. Talk about a ranking problem -- it's really interesting.
When you make it purely random, if you have more pictures of something, then of course
they'll show up. And I had somebody else's collection of a
thousand photos on my hard drive for some reason, and I keep seeing these photos.
And like you say, it's like, "That's boring. I don't want them.”
So there's some work here to do on, How do we figure out that, because I was hitting
'skip' on the screensaver -- you know, skip to the next photo -- you ought to be able
to learn that I'm getting bored of that collection. You know, hide it for the next six months,
and then we'll kind of try it out on me again and see whether I've changed my mind.
Q I have a question. There's a lot of work that looked like getting
implicit metadata on time, place, people, retain things like that which was really good.
But I'm curious -- does the system keep track of how long you actually are using the system
to go back and use it?
Jim Gemmell: Yeah. We were tracking all that, yes.
Q Okay, but I mean, as a percentage of time -- this is sort of a follow on question
-- is, it seems very backward-focused. In other words it's sort of encouraging you
to go back and revisit things and correlate and so forth.
And I'm curious, What has it let you do that you otherwise couldn't, going ahead or going
forward?
Jim Gemmell: Well, first of all, no, I don't think we -- I mean, aside from of course we
were building this experimentally and it's, you know, bailing wire and bubble gum and
there's some pain involved. But apart from that, I don't think no, it
does make us look back more or get more focused on the past or anything like that.
But it just does enable. It's just like we've got it there, you know.
So I don't spend, you know -- people really, these cameras get a lot of attention, but
think about, to me, it was having every copy of every web page that I visited.
That didn't mean I spent a lot of time looking or, "Oh, let's look at old web pages.”
Because that's boring. I never do that.
But what I do all the time is go, "Oh, I need to get back to that page.”
And you know think of how many of your customers, it was like a seven-step thing if they did
a search and they clicked on something and they followed and they followed until they
finally got to the page they wanted, and then the next time for them to repeat that, "Okay.
What's the magic incantation? What are the links to follow?”
It's much easier when you're getting it out of your own collection.
>> [pause]
Q Can you speak to the flipside of this? So clearly, everything is getting recorded.
Like I stand here, I can see two cameras over there, two cameras over there, one camera
over there. Everything I do is getting recorded, even
if you weren't carrying it around your neck. But can you talk about the society we will
get when everything is recorded and everything is searchable?
So if you are in Soviet Russia, and everything is recorded, and you really cannot hide, like
in 1984, what happens? I mean what happens to -- what kind of a society
do we get?
Gordon Bell: Well, I mean the most publicity I think of is not Russia, but in the U.K.
The real examples I think of -- I'll say spectacular finds -- are really from all the cameras in
Britain. They have more cameras per area and per person
than any place around, I believe. We're getting -- I notice we're getting more
and more whether it's at the airport or wherever. I've always felt it would be very interesting.
When all of these ______-- like this room or so I don't have to have the thing, but
I'll say, "I want to go back to the room.” I'll say, "Room! Tell me about this.”
So I think we'll get to this point. I think there will be the point when I say,
"Gee. I had a meeting in that room.
I forget what went on.” Ask the room.
I think that these things will take on this capability.
Like a car. You know a car. "Car, what did I do?" or "Where did I go,
car?" and you know, then you get into the thing -- Can the car testify against you?
And that's already happening. Because the car knows where it's been and
it knows how fast and all of these things. And so, you get into this privacy of the car
-- privacy of the occupants of the car -- are happening.
Jim Gemmell: Yeah, and I think this raises a great point that we already are being recorded
so much that, in one sense, if you aren't doing recording of your life, you might be
the only one who isn't. Your government, the bank, your credit card
company -- they know all about you, but you're kind of clueless.
You don't know your patterns as well as they do.
Q But then, what do you do when the government does evil?
Or it doesn't -- or you're doing something that the government doesn't like.
Like in China, and you're speaking up against the party.
What do you do? I mean, you cannot hide.
Jim Gemmell: Well, so what about, I think it would be wonderful if we want to advocate
for governments to do less recording. I think, the individual -- we can work out
what we believe about recording each other and so on.
But if we want to say to the government, "You should be doing less recording.”
That's great. That's totally different than what we're talking
about. In the book, we're not advocating that governments
record us, or each other. We're saying, Your memories, like an extension
of your brain, right? I'm with you. If you want to do some kind of petition to
slow down the government, I'm there.
Gordon Bell: By the way, the focus on the book is strongly around the individual.
And what do you get. What the individual gets by having more and
more things recorded. And the thing is, Well, do we wear these cameras?
Do we take more pictures? No. Do we record this or that?
I'd say, "Not really. As people who work with computers and other
people in the knowledge industry -- what we need it for usually is, We've got this enormous
amount of traffic going back and forth in e-mails and all of the stuff that's on our
screen. We want all of that to be recorded, because
that's really where the payoff is in the professional life.
Or in a personal life, it's every transaction -- every financial transaction -- that goes
on so that when we, you know, do our income tax or have to fill out a travel form or anything
like that, that that stuff is all there for us.
The fact that we've gone paperless. I was paperless in 2002 and you know, it just
makes life so much nicer to not have to think about any of those documents, any of the bills
and stuff like that. And the banks and all the financial guys are
now trying to make, "Please go paperless.” They want to save money, but from our standpoint
-- from a user standpoint -- it's a great advantage, because you can finally find something
that you couldn't have found.
Q Didn't you recently have to tell Australia every time you'd be in and out of the country,
or something?
Gordon Bell: Oh yeah. And now.
Q So, right now you're wearing cameras around your neck; you're carrying voice recorders
in your pocket. I imagine to get sort of wider adoption on
something like this, you'd need some kind of less-conspicuous hardware.
Have you spent any time thinking about that? What's your vision on What's this going to
look like?
Jim Gemmell: Actually, so Lyndsay Williams who invented this -- her goal ultimately was
to have it as a nice little bit of jewelry that she'd be able to put on her dress.
And really, you know, this is just a prototype. So it's literally some other digital camera
ripped apart, and stuck in here with these sensors.
It could really, really shrink down and we think it could be fashionable in clothing,
you know? Already the miniaturization is there.
It's just how you pack it up. You can stuff it into an iPod nano now, no
problem, right?
Q According to the Russian ____ , there are a bunch spy stories around.
So you can, depending on how much you want, you can?
Q But do you envision people actually embedding these things in their bodies somehow so you
don't even have to wear it as an item of clothing or jewelry or something?
Gordon Bell: I don't know whether that's going to happen for recording.
We've got a long way to go before people get any value out of this.
The big problem with all of the audio stuff. I've got two or three thousand telephone conversations.
I stopped doing it, because it was only a few cases that I want to transcribe stuff.
The value wasn't there. So as engineers, it was like, "We did all
this stuff to find out, What's the value in them?
Do you want to bother with it? Is it paying off?”
So our stuff is strongly payoff-driven. If there were good speech-to-text.
If there were great speech-to-text, better than that, if you had great speech-to-text,
believe me, there would be recording going on all the time.
The only reason you don't record often -- people don't record audio -- it takes as
long to listen to the stuff as it did to have the original.
Whereas text, you know, our e-mail and stuff like that, you can read that stuff so fast;
computers can read it. But a computer basically can't touch audio.
It can barely touch video in terms of Does it know anything about it?
It's whether the computer knows. So we are strongly -- It isn't really information
unless the computer -- or it isn't valuable to us unless the computer knows about it.
Jim Gemmell: Yeah, I think also, as we talk about this growing starting now, Where's the
value? The value is in What's everything I've ever
read as a knowledge worker? What's all my health data to deal with my health? And then,
when you get into pictures, I think it's, When can someone make one of these that's
really easy to take on vacation and come back and do your travel log, right?.
It's not so much miniaturized. It's a big jump to talk about the society
that's 24/7 recording as we ramp up along What's valuable enough for us to bother with?
It's going to be these kind of applications.
Gordon Bell: By the way, we should mention, we have the books back there and we would
happily sign them. There are a dozen.
I think we've had up to ten start-up ideas. So we wanted to stimulate people, because
we see the industry already -- that there are products and features coming out that
are really memory enhancement things.
Q I appreciate that you're sort of looking for the positive things and looking how to
kind of move forward, but it seems to me that you also have to take responsibility for looking
at the negative side. Looking at the dystopian side as well.
Because, some of your comments about, well, somebody brings up an objection, What if this
happens? And you say, "Well, the laws have to change.”
The laws won't change in a positive way unless people have examined both sides of things.
Otherwise, the law is going to be reactive. As 1984 showed, the government doesn't have
to record everything if they can convince your neighbors to do it for you.
So, you know, you don't have to worry about necessarily the government recording everything
you do if your neighbor walks out and you know walks through the street every day.
They'll have a pretty good picture of what's going on in your neighborhood.
So, like I said, while I do appreciate what you're looking for, I think it would also
be good to really focus on some of the problems that come up as well.
Jim Gemmell: Well, you're right. And we spend some time in the book talking
about these problems of What does the revolution mean to us?
And one of our points is, Probably more than Big Brother, you need to worry about Little
Brother -- exactly as you said. And that electronic gossip is the biggest
threat that probably will face us in the short-term. And again, that we face that now.
That's already here. So even if nobody reads our book or pays any
attention to us, we are already at that point where Little Brother could be spying on you
and gossiping about you. And that we need to come to grips with it.
And we need to, you know, whether it's developing new laws.
Or whether, as technologists, are there things we can do?
I mean, can we develop devices that will share permissions with each other about what you
can record, and say, "Yeah, you're allowed to record me.
No, you're not. I trust you. I don't trust you."
I'm just speculating here when I say, "Yeah. These are real problems, and we have
to come to grips with them." And we have to now.
So part of what we're saying too about it being inevitable is, it's here; it's happening.
Even the people who think, "I don't want to have anything to do with this.”
It's coming. You know, I think even the people who say,
"I don't want to have anything to do with this.”
Will still record their life on a scale that will blow away everyone from the previous
century. That will be -- last century will be considered
nothing, absolutely nothing for you to max out what you would have had from the 20th
century. And yeah, we're going to grapple with it.
It's here. So what are we going to do about it?
It's not us advocating "Should we or shouldn't we?”
It's going to happen.
>> All right. Gentlemen, thanks for speaking with us today.
It was a great presentation. Thank you.
>> You're welcome.
>> [clapping]