Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better. Clive Thompson
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СКАЧАТЬ computer to give me a taste of what his “surrogate brain,” as he calls it, had captured of me. (He keeps a copy of his lifelog on his desktop and his laptop.) The screen fills with a flood of Clive-related material: twenty-odd e-mails Bell and I had traded, copies of my articles he’d perused online, and pictures beginning with our very first meeting, a candid shot of me with my hand outstretched. He clicks on an audio file from a conversation we’d had the day before, and the office fills with the sound of the two of us talking about a jazz concert he’d seen in Australia with his wife. It’s eerie hearing your own voice preserved in somebody else’s memory base. Then I realize in shock that when he’d first told me that story, I’d taken down incorrect notes about it. I’d written that he was with his daughter, not his wife. Bell’s artificial memory was correcting my memory.

      Bell did not intend to be a pioneer in recording his life. Indeed, he stumbled into it. It started with a simple desire: He wanted to get rid of stacks of paper. Bell has a storied history; in his twenties, he designed computers, back when they were the size of refrigerators, with spinning hard disks the size of tires. He quickly became wealthy, quit his job to become a serial investor, and then in the 1990s was hired by Microsoft as an éminence grise, tasked with doing something vaguely futuristic—whatever he wanted, really. By that time, Bell was old enough to have amassed four filing cabinets crammed with personal archives, ranging from programming memos to handwritten letters from his kid and weird paraphernalia like a “robot driver’s license.” He was sick of lugging it around, so in 1997 he bought a scanner to see if he could go paperless. Pretty soon he’d turned a lifetime of paper into searchable PDFs and was finding it incredibly useful. So he started thinking: Why not have a copy of everything he did? Microsoft engineers helped outfit his computer with autorecording software. A British engineer showed him the SenseCam she’d invented. He began wearing that, too. (Except for the days where he’s worried it’ll stop his heart. “I’ve been a little leery of wearing it for the last week or so because the pacemaker company sent a little note around,” he tells me. He had a massive heart attack a few years back and had a pacemaker implanted. “Pacemakers don’t like magnets, and the SenseCam has one.” One part of his cyborg body isn’t compatible with the other.)

      The truth is, Bell looks a little nuts walking around with his recording gear strapped on. He knows this; he doesn’t mind. Indeed, Bell possesses the dry air of a wealthy older man who long ago ceased to care what anyone thinks about him, which is probably why he was willing to make his life into a radical experiment. He also, frankly, seems like someone who needs an artificial memory, because I’ve rarely met anyone who seems so scatterbrained in everyday life. He’ll start talking about one subject, veer off to another in midsentence, only to interrupt that sentence with another digression. If he were a teenager, he’d probably be medicated for ADD.

      Yet his lifelog does indeed let him perform remarkable memory feats. When a friend has a birthday, he’ll root around in old handwritten letters to find anecdotes for a toast. For a commencement address, he dimly recalled a terrific aphorism that he’d pinned to a card above his desk three decades before, and found it: “Start many fires.” Given that he’s old, his health records have become quite useful: He’s used SenseCam pictures of his post-heart-attack chest rashes to figure out whether he was healing or not, by quickly riffling through them like a flip-book. “Doctors are always asking you stuff like ‘When did this pain begin?’ or ‘What were you eating on such and such a day?’—and that’s precisely the stuff we’re terrible at remembering,” he notes. While working on a Department of Energy task force a few years ago, he settled an argument by checking the audio record of a conference call. When he tried to describe another jazz performance, he found himself tongue-tied, so he just punched up the audio and played it.

      Being around Bell is like hanging out with some sort of mnemonic performing seal. I wound up barking weird trivia questions just to see if he could answer them. When was the first-ever e-mail you sent your son? 1996. Where did you go to church when you were a kid? Here’s a First Methodist Sunday School certificate. Did you leave a tip when you bought a coffee this morning on the way to work? Yep—here’s the pictures from Peet’s Coffee.

      But Bell believes the deepest effects of his experiment aren’t just about being able to recall details of his life. I’d expected him to be tied to his computer umbilically, pinging it to call up bits of info all the time. In reality, he tends to consult it sparingly—mostly when I prompt him for details he can’t readily bring to mind.

      The long-term effect has been more profound than any individual act of recall. The lifelog, he argues, given him greater mental peace. Knowing there’s a permanent backup of almost everything he reads, sees, or hears allows him to live more in the moment, paying closer attention to what he’s doing. The anxiety of committing something to memory is gone.

      “It’s a freeing feeling,” he says. “The fact that I can offload my memory, knowing that it’s there—that whatever I’ve seen can be found again. I feel cleaner, lighter.”

      The problem is that while Bell’s offboard memory may be immaculate and detailed, it can be curiously hard to search. Your organic brain may contain mistaken memories, but generally it finds things instantaneously and fluidly, and it’s superb at flitting from association to association. If we had met at a party last month and you’re now struggling to remember my name, you’ll often sift sideways through various cues—who else was there? what were we talking about? what music was playing?—until one of them clicks, and ping: The name comes to us. (Clive Thompson!) In contrast, digital tools don’t have our brain’s problem with inaccuracy; if you give it “Clive,” it’ll quickly pull up everything with a “Clive” associated, in perfect fidelity. But machine searching is brittle. If you don’t have the right cue to start with—say, the name “Clive”—or if the data didn’t get saved in the right way, you might never find your way back to my name.

      Bell struggles with these machine limits all the time. 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 he can’t find it on the desktop copy of his lifelog: His 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 colleague’s phone number, he runs into another wall: he can locate all sorts of things—even audio of their last conversation—but no number. “Where the hell is this friggin’ phone call?” he mutters, pecking at the keyboard. “I either get nothing or I get too much!” It’s like a scene from a Philip K. Dick novel: A man has external memory, but it’s locked up tight and he can’t access it—a cyborg estranged from his own mind.

      As I talked to other lifeloggers, they bemoaned the same problem. Saving is easy; finding can be hard. Google and other search engines have spent decades figuring out how to help people find things on the Web, of course. But a Web search is actually easier than searching through someone’s private digital memories. That’s because the Web is filled with social markers that help Google try to guess what’s going to be useful. Google’s famous PageRank system looks at social rankings:15 If a Web page has been linked to by hundreds of other sites, Google guesses that that page is important in some way. But lifelogs don’t have that sort of social data; unlike blogs or online social networks, they’re a private record used only by you.

      Without a way to find or make sense of the material, a lifelog’s greatest strength—its byzantine, brain-busting level of detail—becomes, paradoxically, its greatest flaw. Sure, go ahead and archive your every waking moment, but how do you parse it? Review it? Inspect it? Nobody has another life in which to relive their previous one. The lifelogs remind me of Jorge Luis Borges’s story “On Exactitude in Science,”16 in which a group of cartographers decide to draw a map of their empire with a 1:1 ratio: it is the exact size of the actual empire, with the exact same detail. The next generation realizes that a map like that is useless, so they let it decay. Even if we are moving toward a world where less is forgotten, that isn’t СКАЧАТЬ