Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better. Clive Thompson

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СКАЧАТЬ reflect on a day, you’re more likely to accurately re-remember it again in the future. “It’s like this helps you reshape the memories of your life,” he told me.

      What charmed me is how such a crude signal—the mere mention of a location—could prompt so many memories: geolocation as a Proustian cookie. Again, left to our own devices, we’re unlikely to bother to check year-old digital detritus. But computer code has no problem following routines. It’s good at cueing memories, tickling them to recall more often and more deeply than we’d normally bother. Wegener found that people using his tool quickly formed new, creative habits around the service: They began posting more shouts—pithy, one-sentence descriptions of what they were doing—to their check-ins, since they knew that in a year, these would provide an extra bit of detail to help them remember that day. In essence, they were shouting out to their future selves, writing notes into a diary that would slyly present itself, one year hence, to be read. Wegener renamed his tool Timehop and gradually added more and more forms of memories: Now it shows you pictures and status updates from a year ago, too.

      Given the pattern-finding nature of computers, one can imagine increasingly sophisticated ways that our tools could automatically reconfigure and re-present our lives to us. Eric Horvitz, a Microsoft artificial intelligence researcher, has experimented with a prototype named Lifebrowser, which scours through his massive digital files to try to spot significant life events. First, you tell it which e-mails, pictures, or events in your calendar were particularly vivid; as it learns those patterns, it tries to predict what memories you’d consider to be important landmarks. Horvitz has found that “atypia”—unusual events that don’t repeat—tend to be more significant, which makes sense: “No one ever needs to remember what happened at the Monday staff meeting,” he jokes when I drop by his office in Seattle to see the system at work. Lifebrowser might also detect that when you’ve taken a lot of photos of the same thing, you were trying particularly hard to capture something important, so it’ll select one representative image as important. At his desk, he shows me Lifebrowser in action. He zooms in to a single month from the previous year, and it offers up a small handful of curated events for each day: a meeting at the government’s elite DARPA high-tech research department, a family visit to Whidbey Island, an e-mail from a friend announcing a surprise visit. “I would never have thought about this stuff myself, but as soon as I see it, I go, ‘Oh, right—this was important,’” Horvitz says. The real power of digital memories will be to trigger our human ones.

      In 1942, Borges published another story, about a man with perfect memory. In “Funes, the Memorious,” the narrator encounters a nineteen-year-old boy who, after a horse-riding accident, discovers that he has been endowed with perfect recall. He performs astonishing acts of memory, such as reciting huge swathes of the ancient Roman text Historia Naturalis and describing the precise shape of a set of clouds he saw several months ago. But his immaculate memory, Funes confesses, has made him miserable. Since he’s unable to forget anything, he is tortured by constantly recalling too much detail, too many minutiae, about everything. For him, forgetting would be a gift. “My memory, sir,” he said, “is like a garbage heap.”

      Technically, the condition of being unable to forget is called hyperthymesia, and it has occasionally been found in real-life people. In the 1920s, Russian psychologist Aleksandr Luria examined Solomon Shereshevskii,¹⁸ a young journalist who was able to perform incredible feats of memory. Luria would present Shereshevskii with lists of numbers or words up to seventy figures long. Shereshevskii could recite the list back perfectly—not just right away, but also weeks or months later. Fifteen years after first meeting Shereshevskii, Luria met with him again. Shereshevskii sat down, closed his eyes, and accurately recalled not only the string of numbers but photographic details of the original day from years before. “You were sitting at the table and I in the rocking chair … You were wearing a gray suit,” Shereshevskii told him. But Shereshevskii’s gifts did not make him happy. Like Funes, he found the weight of so much memory oppressive. His memory didn’t even make him smarter; on the contrary, reading was difficult because individual words would constantly trigger vivid memories that disrupted his attention. He “struggled to grasp” abstract concepts like infinity or eternity. Desperate to forget things, Shereshevskii would write down memories on paper and burn them, in hopes that he could destroy his past with “the magical act of burning.” It didn’t work.

      As we begin to record more and more of our lives—intentionally and unintentionally—one can imagine a pretty bleak future. There are terrible parts of my life I’d rather not have documented (a divorce, the sudden death of my best friend at age forty); or at least, when I recall them, I might prefer my inaccurate but self-serving human memories. I can imagine daily social reality evolving into a set of weird gotchas, of the sort you normally see only on a political campaign trail. My wife and I, like many couples, bicker about who should clean the kitchen; what will life be like when there’s a permanent record on tap and we can prove whose turn it is? Sure, it’d be more accurate and fair; it’d also be more picayune and crazy. These aren’t idle questions, either, or even very far off. The sorts of omnipresent recording technologies that used to be experimental or figments of sci-fi are now showing up for sale on Amazon. A company named Looxcie sells a tiny camera to wear over your ear, like a Bluetooth phone mike; it buffers ten hours of video, giving the wearer an ability to rewind life like a TiVo. You can buy commercial variants of Bell’s SenseCam, too.

      Yet the experience of the early lifeloggers suggests that we’re likely to steer a middle path with artificial memory. It turns out that even those who are rabidly trying to record everything quickly realize their psychic limits, as well as the limits of the practice’s usefulness.

      This is particularly true when it comes to the socially awkward aspect of lifelogging—which is that recording one’s own life inevitably means recording other people’s, too. Audio in particular seems to be unsettling. When Bell began his lifelogging project, his romantic partner quickly began insisting she mostly be left out of it. “We’d be talking, and she’d suddenly go, ‘You didn’t record that, did you?’ And I’d admit, ‘Yeah, I did.’ ‘Delete it! Delete it!’” Cathal Gurrin discovered early in his experiment that people didn’t mind being on camera. “Girlfriends have been remarkably accepting of it. Some think it’s really great to have their picture taken,” he notes. But he gave up on trying to record audio. “One colleague of mine did it for a week, and nobody would talk to him.” He laughs. Pictures, he suspects, offer a level of plausible deniability that audio doesn’t. I’ve noticed this, too, as a reporter. When I turn my audio recorder off during an interview, people become more open and candid, even if they’re still on the record. People want their memories to be cued, not fully replaced; we reserve the existential pleasures of gently rewriting our history.

      Gurrin argues that society will have to evolve social codes that govern artificial memory. “It’s like there’s now an unspoken etiquette around when you can and can’t take mobile phone pictures,” he suggests. Granted, these codes aren’t yet very firm, and will probably never be; six years into Facebook’s being a daily tool, intimate friends still disagree about whether it’s fair to post drunken pictures of each other. Interestingly (or disturbingly), in our social lives we seem to be adopting concepts that used to obtain solely in institutional and legal environments. The idea of a meeting going “in camera” or “off the record” is familiar to members of city councils or corporate boards. But that language is seeping into everyday life: the popular Google Chat program added a button so users could go “off the record,” for example. Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, the author of Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age, says we’ll need to engineer more artificial forgetting into our lives. He suggests that digital tools should be designed¹⁹ so that, when we first record something—a picture, a blog post, an instant messaging log—we’re asked how long it ought to stick around: a day, a week, forever? When the time is up, it’s automatically zapped into the dustbin. This way, he argues, our life traces would consist only of the stuff we’ve actively decided ought to stick around. It’s an intriguing idea, which I will take up later when I discuss social СКАЧАТЬ