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?

Enlarge

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.

Machine memory is obviously giving us astonishing abilities, but can we deal with the change it'll wreak in our lives and work? We might become so reliant on artificial memory that we lose the habit of noticing things. "What is going to happen to us if we bypass something and we ought to have noticed it?" wonders Frank Nack, the lifelogging skeptic. Is it possible to forget how to remember? Perhaps so: Most of us have lost a cell phone only to realize that we can no longer recall the phone numbers of even our closest friends because the machine remembered them for us.

Whatever it all means, Bell will likely be the first person on the planet to find out. As I leave him at his San Francisco office, he offers me a parting gift, and fittingly enough, it's a memory device: one of the notebooks he buys at a nearby stationery store. It's beautiful, oddly old-fashioned. Yes, the man who swore off paper knows it would be much easier for MyLifeBits if he did all his writing electronically, on a digital tablet or whatnot. "But I can't help it," he says, "I just love these gorgeous Japanese-made notebooks." He did, after all, spend decades as a young engineer recording every idea on pads of his own. Some habits die hard.