From Memex to Digital Immortality
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From Memex to Digital Immortality |
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Microsoft Research started a project to implement a personal digital store - a kind of 'back-up brain' that will hold a database of your life. Is this a right way to 'digital immortality'?
Yet again, Microsoft has created a wave of controversy surrounding the recently announced research project to fulfill the Memex vision first posited by Vannevar Bush in 1945. Bush was the chief scientific advisor to Franklin Roosevelt and director of the government's Office of Scientific Research and Development, where he supervised the research that led to the creation of the atomic bomb and other military technologies. Many researchers attribute the concept of hypertext - the founding pillar of World Wide Web - to his pioneering article "As We May Think" in a 1945 issue of Atlantic Monthly. It describes mechanically linked information-retrieval machines to help scholars and decision makers faced with what was already becoming an explosion of information. ...consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library. It needs a name, and, to coin one at random, "memex" will do. A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.
Now Microsoft Research found a handy way to fill up our hard disks for years to come (but not only by future bloatware versions of Windows and Office :). MyLifeBits is a system for storing all of one's digital media, including documents, images, sounds and videos. Imagine being able to run a Google-like search on your life, says Gordon Bell, one of the developers. He is already putting as much material as he can in a "directory of his life", including every e-mail message sent and received, as well as everything he reads or buys online. The team estimates that within five years a terabyte hard drives will be common and inexpensive (< $300). Translated to more practical terms, a terabyte data store enables storing 2900 1MB documents or 9800 300 KB pictures per day for a year. It seems that we finally have an abundant storage mechanism on the horizon, where the delete operation may well become obsolete - the user's time for the delete operation will be more costly than the storage to keep the item. But supposing one did keep virtaully everything, would there be any value to it?
Going back to Bush, the main problem lies with what he termed "the matter of selection" (or information retrieval) and the primary reason that those who need information cannot find it lies in turn with inadequate means of storing, arranging, and tagging information:
The real heart of the matter of selection, however, goes deeper than a lag in the adoption of mechanisms by libraries, or a lack of development of devices for their use. Our inaptitude in getting at the record is largely caused by the artificiality of systems of indexing... The human mind does not work that way. It operates by association. With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain. Using the MS SQL Server with Index Server, Speech SDK, and other common tools, MyLifeBits team is working on smart tags for each item in the database that allow them to be searched for in different ways, and also record the relationship of those items to others in the store. The final goal is to "free" the information contained inside the database from the straightjacket of strict hierarchy so commonly present in today's computer file systems and to allow multiple views and visualizations to the same data.
This project is also viewed as a practical way of achieving "digital immortality", where one's experiences are digitally preserved and can then take a life of their own through digital "avatars". Various Web sites (Legacy.com, Forever Network) already offer to store letters, essays, photos and videos in order to pass them on to future generations. New technologies will enhance our ability to convey ideas and experiences, creating a novel relationship with future generations. Scanning and digitizing our most essential feature - our mind - is one of the radical ideas of inventor and writer Ray Kurzweil. In his book The Age of Spiritual Machines he draws a road map, showing how advancing computer technology and Artificial Intelligence will lead to the possibility of existence inside of a computer in just a few decades. Other similar ideas can be found in a recent Wired article "A Few Ways to Win Mortality War". aboutAI.net covered transhumanism and similar approached to enhance our intellectual, physical, and emotional capacities using the modern technology in this article.