The point of lifelogging is to create total recall. If a lifelog records everything in your life, then it could recover anything you experienced even if your meaty mind may have forgotten it. It would be like being able to google your life, if in fact your life were being indexed and fully saved. Our biological memories are so spotty that any compensation would be a huge win. Bell’s experimental version of total recall helped increase his productivity. He could verify facts from previous conversations or recover insights he had forgotten. His system had little problem recording his life into bits, but he learned retrieving the meaningful bits needed better tools.
I’ve been wearing a tiny camera that I clip to my shirt, inspired by the one Gordon Bell wore. The Narrative is about an inch square. It takes a still photo every minute all day long, or whenever I wear it. I can also force a shot by tapping on the square twice. The photos go to the cloud, where they are processed and then sent back to my phone or the web. Narrative’s software smartly groups the images into scenes during my day and then selects the most representative three images for each scene. This reduces the flood of images. Using this visual summary, I can flick through the 2,000 images per day very quickly, and then expand the stream of a particular scene for more images to find the exact moment I want to recall. I can easily browse the lifestream of an entire day in less than a minute. I find it mildly useful as a very detailed visual diary, a lifelogging asset that needs to be invaluable only a couple of times a month to make it worthwhile.
Typical users, Narrative has found, employ this photo diary while they attend conferences, or go on vacation, or want to record an experience. Recalling a conference is ideal. The continuous camera captures the many new people you meet. Better than a business card, you can much more easily recall them years later, and what they talked about, by browsing your lifestream. The photo lifestream is a strong prompt for vacations and family events. For instance, I recently used the Narrative during my nephew’s wedding. It includes not only the iconic moments shared by everyone, but captured the conversations I had with people I had not talked to before. This version of Narrative does not record audio, but the next version will. In his research Bell discovered that the most informative media to capture is audio, prompted and indexed by photos. Bell told me that if he could have only one, he’d rather have an audio log of his day than a visual log.
An embrace of an expanded version of lifelogging would offer these four categories of benefits:
A constant 24/7/365 monitoring of vital body measurements. Imagine how public health would change if we continuously monitored blood glucose in real time. Imagine how your behavior would change if you could, in near real time, detect the presence or absence of biochemicals or toxins in your blood picked up from your environment. (You might conclude: “I’m not going back there!”) This data could serve both as a warning system and also as a personal base upon which to diagnose illness and prescribe medicines.
An interactive, extended memory of people you met, conversations you had, places you visited, and events you participated in. This memory would be searchable, retrievable, and shareable.
A complete passive archive of everything that you have ever produced, wrote, or said. Deep comparative analysis of your activities could assist your productivity and creativity.
A way of organizing, shaping, and “reading” your own life.
To the degree this lifelog is shared, this archive of information could be leveraged to help others work and to amplify social interactions. In the health realm, shared medical logs could rapidly advance medical discoveries.
For many skeptics, there are two challenges that will doom lifelogging to a small minority. First, current social pressure casts self-tracking as the geekiest thing you could possibly do. Owners of Google Glass quickly put them away because they didn’t like how they looked and they felt uncomfortable recording among their friends—or even uncomfortable explaining why they were not recording. As Gary Wolf said, “Recording in a diary is considered admirable. Recording in a spreadsheet is considered creepy.” But I believe we’ll quickly invent social norms and technological innovations to navigate the times when lifelogging is appropriate or not. When cell phones first appeared among the early adopters in the 1990s, there was a terrible cacophony of ringers. Cell phones rang at high decibels on trains, in bathrooms, in movie theaters. While talking on an early cell phone, people raised their voices as loud as the ringers. If you imagined back then what the world would sound like in the near future when everyone had a cell phone, you could only envision a nonstop racket. That didn’t happen. Silent vibrators were invented, people learned to text, and social norms prevailed. I can go to a movie today in which every person in the theater has a cell phone, and not hear one ring or even see one lighted screen. It’s considered not cool. We’ll evolve the same kind of social conventions and technical fixes that will make lifelogging acceptable.
Second, how can lifelogging work when each person will generate petabytes, if not exabytes, of data each year? There is no way anyone can troll through that ocean of bits. You’ll drown without a single insight. That is roughly true with today’s software. Making sense of the data is an immense, time-consuming problem. You have to be highly numerate, technically agile, and supremely motivated to extract meaning from the river of data you generate. That is why self-tracking is still a minority sport. However, cheap artificial intelligence will overcome much of this. The AI in research labs is already powerful enough to sift through billions of records and surface important, meaningful patterns. As just one example, the same AI at Google that can already describe what is going on in a random photo could (when it is cheap enough) digest the images from my Narrative shirt cam so that I can simply ask Narrative in plain English to find me the guy who was wearing a pirate hat at a party I attended a couple of years ago. And there it is, and his stream would be linked to mine. Or I could ask it to determine the kind of rooms that tend to raise my heart rate. Was it the color, the temperature, the height of the ceilings? Although it seems like wizardry now, this will be considered a very mechanical request in a decade, not very different from asking Google to find something—which would have been magical 20 years ago.
Still, the picture is not big enough. We—the internet of people—will track ourselves, much of our lives. But the internet of things is much bigger, and billions of things will track themselves too. In the coming decades nearly every object that is manufactured will contain a small sliver of silicon that is connected to the internet. One consequence of this wide connection is that it will become feasible to track how each thing is used with great precision. For example, every car manufactured since 2006 contains a tiny OBD chip mounted under the dashboard. This chip records how your car is used. It tracks miles driven, at what speed, times of sudden braking, speed of turns, and gas mileage. This data was originally designed to help repair the car. Some insurance companies, such as Progressive, will lower your auto insurance rates if you give them access to your OBD driving log. Safer drivers pay less. The GPS location of cars can also be tracked very accurately, so it would be possible to tax drivers based on which roads they use and how often. These usage charges could be thought of as virtual tolls or automatic taxation.