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.

As for Bell, he acknowledges that all this remembering could have a downside. "Fifty years from now, do you want to know that, gee, I visited a porn site today?" he asks with a smile. And when it comes to corporate information, he admits that "ownership, deniability, privacy, expungability--they're important." Microsoft hasn't yet objected to all of its sensitive corporate memos going into Bell's off-site brain, but he suspects that day will come. When he eventually retires, he says, he'll be in the weird position of having to shave those memories off and give them back. "I'll need a lobotomy," he says, only half joking.

Still, Bell insists the trend toward total memory isn't going away. More and more, it is happening automatically. Those tens of millions of bloggers and Flickr users--all out there recording their thoughts and pictures--have clearly decided that there's enormous value not just in capturing those thoughts but in sharing them with the public. The choice isn't whether you'll join the revolution but whether you'll embrace it.

Shaping Chaos

For all of its machine muscle, Bell's virtual memory wasn't quite what I imagined. When I first heard about his work, I expected someone who would dazzle me mentally, pulling off feats of recollection like some cyborgian savant: Quick--give me the name of a random seatmate on a flight last July! List all the ingredients from that stroganoff you made back in college! And indeed, hanging out with a mnemonist could be quite unsettling. One day, Bell was trying to describe to me a superb jazz-trumpet performance he'd attended in Australia the week before, then realized he didn't have to--he just found the audio file of the event and played it, the sinuous solo blasting out his computer speakers. (He concedes, sheepishly, that it probably wasn't quite legal to record the event.)

MyLifeBits is now so big that it faces a classic problem of information management: It's hellishly difficult to search, and Bell often finds himself lost in the forest. He hunts for an email but can't lay his hands on it. He gropes for a document, but it eludes him. While eating lunch in San Francisco, he tells me about a Paul Krugman column he liked, so I ask him to show it to me. But it's like pulling teeth: A MyLifeBits search for "Paul Krugman" produces scores of columns, and Bell can't quite filter out the right one. When I ask him to locate a phone call from one of his colleagues, he hits a bug: He can locate the name of the file, but when he clicks on it the data are AWOL. "Where the hell is this friggin' phone call?" he mutters to himself, pecking at the keyboard. "I either get nothing or I get too much!"

Granted, MyLifeBits is an experimental demo, and thus naturally unstable. And even when his system is failing, Bell remains pretty bemused about everything, displaying the perpetual geniality of all brilliant, accomplished, wealthy older men who've long ceased to care what anyone thinks of them. Still, as I watch the hunt for the missing call, it feels like some creepy sci-fi version of Alzheimer's, or a scene plucked out of a bleak Philip K. Dick novel: Our antihero has an external brain with perfect recall, but it's locked up tight and he can't get in--a cyborg estranged from his own limbs.

This turns out to be the central question behind MyLifeBits: Yes, it's possible to store a lifetime of memories, but what do you do with them?

To figure that out, I made a visit to Mary Czerwinski, a principal research scientist at Microsoft Research Labs whose team has developed "Facetmap," an audacious piece of software designed to visualize the contents of Bell's cybermemory.

When I meet the energetic, hyperverbal Czerwinski, she pulls me over to a massive 3-foot-by-3-foot LCD monitor on her office wall. On-screen there's a collection of colorful blobs representing different parts of Bell's life. There's a blob for people, another for calendar dates, and a bunch for different types of documents like email or Word files. She shows me how it works: If you click on any blob, it instantly expands to show you everything it contains. Click on the blob for "Jim Gemmell," Bell's main collaborator, and you'll see a blob containing all their email traffic, another with documents that mention Gemmell's name, and a third with events where he appears. The more data in each category, the bigger the blob, "so you can quickly see which area has had the most action," she notes.