A Head For Detail

By: Clive ThompsonWed Dec 19, 2007 at 8:14 AM

Gordon Bell feeds every piece of his life into a surrogate brain, and soon the rest of us will be able to do the same. But does perfect memory make you smarter, or just drive you nuts?

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A few of the things on Gordon Bell's mind: From ancestral photos to his MIT diploma to his robot driver's license, it's all in there. And we do mean all.

That's because when I first met the affable 72-year-old computer scientist at the offices of Microsoft Research Labs, in Redmond, Washington, he was carefully recording my every move. He had a tiny bug-eyed camera around his neck, and a small audio recorder at his elbow. As we chatted about various topics--Australian jazz musicians, his futuristic cell phone, the Seattle area's gorgeous weather--Bell's gear quietly logged my every gesture and all my blathering small talk, snapping a picture every 60 seconds. Back at his office, his computer had carefully archived every document related to me: all the email I'd sent him, copies of my articles he'd read, pages he'd surfed on my blog.

"Oh, I've got everything," Bell said cheerily. And when I saw him the next day, down in his cramped personal office in San Francisco, he offered to give me a glimpse of the memories he'd collected. He plunked down in front of his computer, pulled up a browser, typed in "Clive Fast Company," and there they were: Hundreds of pictures of the meeting scrolled by on his screen, and the sound of our day-old conversation filled the room. It was a deeply strange feeling. My random chitchat is being preserved? For all eternity? He nodded, pointing to a mundane Dell computer parked beneath his desk. His massive store of data. His "surrogate brain."

Because I'm not the only thing Gordon Bell will never forget. His goal is never to forget anything.

For the past seven years, Bell has been conducting an audacious experiment in "lifelogging"--creating a near-total digital record of his experience. His custom-designed software, "MyLifeBits," saves everything it can get its hands on. For every piece of email he sends and receives, every document he types, every chat session he engages in, every Web page he surfs, a copy is scooped up and stashed away. MyLifeBits records his telephone calls and archives every picture--up to 1,000 a day--snapped by his automatic "SenseCam," that device slung around his neck. He has even stowed his entire past: The massive stacks of documents from his 47-year computer career, first as a millionaire executive then as a government Internet bureaucrat, have been hoovered up and scanned in. The last time he counted, MyLifeBits had more than 101,000 emails, almost 15,000 Word and PDF documents, 99,000 Web pages, and 44,000 pictures.

"And that," he cackles, "is a s--tload of stuff."

That load has endowed Bell with the ability to perform supernatural feats of memory. He can dredge up the precise contents of an inspirational note above his desk 30 years ago (a set of aphorisms, including "Start many fires"). He knows who passed him on the street on the way to work four weeks ago. And when someone disputes his recollection of a conference call the previous day, he can end the argument by pulling up the audio stream and listening to it again. Instantly.

"It gives you kind of a feeling of cleanliness," Bell tells me. "I can offload my memory. I feel much freer about remembering something now. I've got this machine, this slave, that does it."

It gives his mind the chance, he says, to be more playful, to have more energy for creative thinking. But it is also a double-edged sword. Bell suspects MyLifeBits might be slowly degrading his real, carbon-based brain's ability to remember clearly. When you have an outboard mind doing the scut work, you tend to get out of practice. "It's like doing arithmetic," he says. "Who does it anymore? You've got pocket calculators for that. I know I can do long division. But I haven't done it for a long time."

It's a crazy experiment. But perhaps its craziest aspect is that soon you'll be part of it too--whether you want to be or not. The way Bell sees it, computers and the Internet are now rapidly becoming capable of storing everything you do and see. Hard-drive space has exploded in size, and every day people are recording more and more of their lives: We blog about our thoughts, upload personal pictures to Flickr, save every email on our infinitely expanding Gmail accounts, shoot video on our cell phones, record phone calls straight to our hard drives when we use Skype.

"People say, 'Oh, what you're doing is revolutionary!'" Bell says. "I say, 'No, no, it's evolutionary. Because it's happening to you. It's happening as you speak.'"

So what will life be like when nothing is forgotten? Provocative as that question may be, it's hardly theoretical. The thinking behind MyLifeBits and other lifelogging research is already seeping into our lives. It's changing the way our search engines work. It's affecting corporate strategy. And the power of machines to create boundless memory--and to augment and even transform human thinking--is only going to become more pronounced. We've arrived at a time when the memory of machines creates ideas we've never considered.