Total Recall Hardback - 2009

by Bell, Gordon; Gemmell, Jim

THE TOTAL RECALL REVOLUTION IS INEVITABLE.

IT WILL CHANGE WHAT IT MEANS TO BE HUMAN.

IT HAS ALREADY BEGUN.

What if you could remember everything? Soon, if you choose, you will beable to conveniently and affordably record your whole life in minutedetail. You would have Total Recall. Authors Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell drawon experience from their MyLifeBits project at Microsoft Research to explain the benefits to come from an earth-shaking and inevitable increase in electronicmemories. In 1998 they began using Bell, a luminary in the computer world, as atest case, attempting to digitally record as much of his life as possible. Photos, letters, and memorabilia were scanned. Everything he did on his computer wascaptured. He wore an automatic camera, an arm-strap that logged his bio-metrics,and began recording telephone calls. This experiment, and the system created tosupport it, put them at the center of a movement studying the creation and enjoyment of e-memories.

Since then the three streams of technology feeding the Total Recall revolution--digital recording,digital storage, and digital search, have become gushing torrents. We are capturing somuch of our lives now, be it on the date--and location--stamped photos we take withour smart phones or in the continuous records we have of our emails, instant messages,and tweets--not to mention the GPS tracking of our movements many cars and smart phonesdo automatically. We are storing what we capture either out there in the "cloud" ofservices such as Facebook or on our very own increasingly massive and cheap hard drives.But the critical technology, and perhaps least understood, is our magical new abilityto find the information we want in the mountain of data that is our past. And not justGoogle it, but data mine it so that, say, we can chart how much exercise we have been doing in the last four weeks in comparison with what we did four years ago. In health,education, work life, and our personal lives, the Total Recall revolution is going tochange everything. As Bell and Gemmell show, it has already begun.

Total Recall provides a glimpse of the near future. Imagine heart monitors woveninto your clothes and tiny wearable audio and visual recorders automatically capturing what you see and hear. Imagine being able to summon up the e-memories of your great grandfather and his avatar giving you advice about whether or not to go to college, acceptthat job offer, or get married. The range of potential insights is truly awesome. But Belland Gemmell also show how you can begin to take better advantage of this new technologyright now. From how to navigate the serious questions of privacy and serious problem ofapplication compatibility to what kind of startups Bell is willing to invest in and whichscanner he prefers, this is a book about a turning point in human knowledge as well as an immediate and practical guide.

Total Recall is a technological revolution that will accomplish nothing less than a transformationin the way humans think about the meaning of their lives."What would happen if we could instantly access all the information we were exposed to throughout our lives?"-Bill Gates, from the Foreword