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.

Paperless Trail

You could trace the notion of perfect recall back to 1945, when presidential science adviser Vannevar Bush published a provocative essay in The Atlantic Monthly entitled "As We May Think." Bush argued that man's mind could be perfected by technology. He envisioned a device called a Memex, "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." A user would wear a "walnut-sized" camera on his forehead, capturing everything he saw, then sit down at his Memex to browse thousands of personal letters, newspapers, and encyclopedias instantly. It would be, Bush argued, "an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory."

"We've come to a time when machine memory creates ideas we've never considered."

MyLifeBits was born from a much humbler idea: Bell was sick of carting around stacks of paper. He was a veteran of the computer revolution--indeed, he helped kick-start it in the 1960s and 1970s by building the first refrigerator-sized "minicomputers" for DEC, a pioneering computer firm. In the 1980s, he helped the government bootstrap the Internet into existence, then worked as an angel in Silicon Valley, growing wealthier and wealthier as his investments took flight. Hired in 1995 by Microsoft Research Labs, a wing of the company devoted to designing the future of computers, Bell was given carte blanche. He decided to become the first person in history "to truly go paperless."

So he bought a scanner, and his poor assistant Vicki, a witty, motherly 56-year-old, began the arduous slog of making PDFs of four enormous filing cabinets' worth of stuff. The archive begins with photos of Bell's mother's birth in 1900 and basically never stops, sucking in everything from the sublime to the ridiculous: Bell's medical records, his Japanese-made notebooks filled with his elegant sketches of computer circuitry, phone bills, stickie notes, a copy of a "robot driver's license" he got a couple of years ago.

His appetite whetted, Bell decided to store even more data. So he turned to two Microsoft researchers, Jim Gemmell and Roger Lueder, who built software to automatically save digital copies of everything Bell generated: chat transcripts, every Web page he looked at, even records of his keystrokes. Then Lyndsay Williams, a Microsoft inventor in Cambridge, England, came up with an even more radical idea: the SenseCam, which creates a visual record of his life, like a personal security camera. It would snap pictures either at regular intervals or when triggered by a meaningful event, such as when its infrared detectors sensed someone standing in front of Bell, or when its light sensors saw that he'd entered a new room. A tagalong GPS device stamps each picture with its geographic location.

At first, Bell was worried about filling up his hard-drive space too quickly. He accumulates 1 gig of information a month, and at that clip, the average MyLifeBits for an 72-year-old person would require 1 to 3 terabytes--a hefty amount of storage. But by 2000, driven by teenagers' insatiable desire to store MP3s and video clips, hard drives had dropped radically in price and grown enormously in capacity. Bell figures that in a few years, even a cheap cell phone will have enough space to store your entire existence. "We've gone from this period of scarcity, when you had to always go, 'Jeez, I can't keep this video file because my hard drive is full,' to the opposite," Bell says. "I tell people, 'Never throw anything out. You'll never have to worry about space for the rest of your life.'"

Slowly, in often subtle ways, MyLifeBits began to affect Bell's life. During a phone call to discuss a heart problem last year, Bell couldn't follow his doctor's flood of jargon--but he could listen to the call again and decode it at his leisure. A friend passed away; Bell was able to pluck a piece of 20-year-old correspondence from the mists for his eulogy. Meanwhile, the presence of the SenseCam and audio recorder began creeping out his "significant other," who wasn't sure she liked having everything set in stone. "We'd be talking, and she'd suddenly go, 'You didn't record that, did you?'" Bell chuckles. "And I'd admit, Yeah, I did. 'Delete it! Delete it!'"

Bell also discovered he was getting annoyed by experiences that couldn't be stuffed into a hard drive. During a ride in a cab in Australia, a tiny security-cam surveyed him, and he wondered why he couldn't automatically get a copy of the feed. And books, in particular, drive him crazy. "I virtually refuse to own any books at this point," he complained at one point. "I mean, I get them, I look at them, I occasionally read them. But then I give them away, because they're not in my memory. To me they're almost gone."