Beautiful thing about memory is that we can forget :). If not completely then just push the memories out of the range of immediate reach. Anotherwords there is this a glorious immunity system that can change memories in order for us to stay sane, by gentle censoring practices. So when we look back, all those awful people aren’t as bad as we thought at the time and all dark images are getting a tint of goodness too. This system may be subjected for an update in the “nearest” future. Controversial version 2.0 is approaching us since 1945…
By getting deeper and deeper in to the digital era, we might finally be ready for invention made by Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell from Microsoft. Their gadget could make us remember – well – everything (and anything)! By remembering I mean 100% backup of live archived on tiny device no bigger than common USB flash drive.

In 1945, Gordon Bell wrote an article in the Atlantic Monthly magazine proposing a machine called a memex that could record knowledge and allow it’s immediate retrieval.

Microsoft has also developed their SenseCam. Device containing a camera and embedded sensors worn around a user’s neck that automatically takes a series of thousands of still images and record ambient light levels, temperature and movement. Researchers at CMU have used the SenseCam to allow elderly people to review their experiences during the day as a way of aiding short-term memory.

Now, thinking about mainstream purpose – why would we need this and who would ever have time to browse trough collected data? I guess it’s fair to say that it would take a lifetime to go trough someone’s life in detail fine enough to fully understand all of the contexts – same way as the first person. There already is technology to filter and index the text, audio and video. So when you need to find specific quote – it’s easy to do so by getting automatically generated bookmarked transcript with cross references.

Imagine you are at the party where you’re supposed to know and remember pretty much everybody. Suddenly there’s a man getting closer from the other end of the room. You know you met him once before… “But for the love of god – what was his name and what is he up to?” System may help to solve that as your portable “personal assistant”. By quickly bringing you back to the end of conversation you both had year ago in this very place…

Such scenario in my books leads directly towards continuing process of population dumbing, by making everyday challenges easy and less demanding. As much as we don’t need to use our brain to remember it’s no longer important to recall someone. Could we then assume that eventually, intelligence as we know it, could become unimportant, same way as anything obsolete in our body in the past. Brain would not disappear obviously, but could shrink dramatically along with it’s capabilities. Could we then rephrase the theory that “robots will eventually take over” in to:  “it’s us who will let go on the first place”?

On the more positive note, there is a whole bunch of props that would help to revolutionize law, criminal system as we always have unquestionable alibi and proofs to prove us right.

Obviously there is a huge risk of ID theft in all this. Once you loose your storage, anyone can look trough your life as trough the book (worst! the directory rather!) Let’s also don’t ignore the fact that government and corporations would kill for an access to such data to target sales or more accurately sell / deny insurance policies.

Those who wouldn’t comply, could most likely be discredited as “less intelligent”, or despite their “organic” intelligence.

Someday the release day will come as it’s now unavoidable. Technology is simple and cheap. Will people care? I would say last few years proved how easily we let our privacy go away in exchange for a bit of fame on platforms like Facebook.

How much data would one individual need to back his life up ? Advances in hard drive capacity are the answer. 1 terabyte hard drive are getting bigger and cheaper every day. What can 1 TB store? Well basically Everything you read in your lifetime shouldn’t exceed few gigabytes. One hundred-thousand photos in JPEG format would use up to 10 GB. Several hundred MP3s format adds 20 GB, and 500 hours of HDTV would use nearly 800 GB…

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Beautiful thing about memory is that we can forget :). If not completely then just push the memories out of the range of immediate reach. Anotherwords there is this a...