Doug
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02:39:52 am on November 21, 2002 | # |
BoingBoing points to a New Scientist article about a new Microsoft project called MyLifeBits:
It is part of a curious venture dubbed the MyLifeBits project, in which engineers at Microsoft’s Media Presence lab in San Francisco are aiming to build multimedia databases that chronicle people’s life events and make them searchable. “Imagine being able to run a Google-like search on your life,” says Gordon Bell, one of the developers…
…Bell and his colleagues developed MyLifeBits as a surrogate brain to solve what they call the “giant shoebox problem”. “In a giant shoebox full of photos, it’s hard to find what you are looking for,” says Microsoft’s Jim Gemmell. Add to this the reels of home movies, videotapes, bundles of letters and documents we file away, and remembering what we have, let alone finding it, becomes a major headache.
I think this is a natural evolution of software like Tinderbox and devices like PDA’s, which already simple provide a basic form of memory augmentation. The idea is nothing new; MyLifeBits is very much true to Vannevar Bush’s vision of the Memex for the 1930’s:
The 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” (102). A memex resembled a desk with two pen-ready touch screen monitors and a scanner surface. Within would lie several gigabytes (if not more) of storage space, filled with textual and graphic information, and indexed according to a universal scheme. All of this seems quite visionary for the early 1930s, but Bush himself viewed it as “conventional.”
Augmentation of human intellectual capabilities on a massive, but personal scale is potentially one of the most exciting things that can come out of the information revolution. Combining such capabilities with ubiquitous, high-speed networking presents truly awesome opportunities and challenges. So, while I find the idea of MyLifeBits intriguing, I also find that it’s a Microsoft project cause for concern. I’m not sure I like the idea of the world’s most predatory monopolist being the driving force behind the realization of Bush’s vision.
