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

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СКАЧАТЬ in history, even more than Bell. Gurrin, a researcher at Dublin City University, began wearing a SenseCam five years ago and has ten million pictures. The SenseCam has preserved candid moments he’d never otherwise have bothered to shoot: the time he lounged with friends in his empty house the day before he moved; his first visit to China, where the SenseCam inadvertently captured the last-ever pictures of historic buildings before they were demolished in China’s relentless urban construction upheaval. He’s dipped into his log to try to squirm out of a speeding ticket (only to have his SenseCam prove the police officer was right; another self-serving memory distortion on the part of his organic memory).

      But Gurrin, too, has found that it can be surprisingly hard to locate a specific image. In a study at his lab, he listed fifty of his “most memorable” moments from the last two and a half years, like his first encounters with new friends, last encounters with loved ones, and meeting TV celebrities. Then, over the next year and a half, his labmates tested him to see how quickly he could find a picture of one of those moments. The experiment was gruesome: The first searches took over thirteen minutes. As the lab slowly improved the image-search tools, his time dropped to about two minutes, “which is still pretty slow,” as one of his labmates noted. This isn’t a problem just for lifeloggers; even middle-of-the-road camera phone users quickly amass so many photos that they often give up on organizing them. Steve Whittaker, a psychologist who designs interfaces and studies how we interact with computers, asked a group of subjects to find a personally significant picture on their own hard drive. Many couldn’t. “And they’d get pretty upset when they realized that stuff was there, but essentially gone,” Whittaker tells me. “We’d have to reassure them that ‘no, no, everyone has this problem!’” Even Gurrin admits to me that he rarely searches for anything at all in his massive archive. He’s waiting for better search tools to emerge.

      Mind you, he’s confident they will. As he points out, fifteen years ago you couldn’t find much on the Web because the search engines were dreadful. “And the first MP3 players were horrendous for finding songs,” he adds. The most promising trends in search algorithms include everything from “sentiment analysis” (you could hunt for a memory based on how happy or sad it is) to sophisticated ways of analyzing pictures, many of which are already emerging in everyday life: detecting faces and locations or snippets of text in pictures, allowing you to hunt down hard-to-track images by starting with a vague piece of half recall, the way we interrogate our own minds. The app Evernote has already become popular because of its ability to search for text, even bent or sideways, within photos and documents.

      Yet the weird truth is that searching a lifelog may not, in the end, be the way we take advantage of our rapidly expanding artificial memory. That’s because, ironically, searching for something leaves our imperfect, gray-matter brain in control. Bell and Gurrin and other lifeloggers have superb records, but they don’t search them unless, while using their own brains, they realize there’s something to look for. And of course, our organic brains are riddled with memory flaws. Bell’s lifelog could well contain the details of a great business idea he had in 1992; but if he’s forgotten he ever had that idea, he’s unlikely to search for it. It remains as remote and unused as if he’d never recorded it at all.

      The real promise of artificial memory isn’t its use as a passive storage device, like a pen-and-paper diary. Instead, future lifelogs are liable to be active—trying to remember things for us. Lifelogs will be far more useful when they harness what computers are uniquely good at: brute-force pattern finding. They can help us make sense of our archives by finding connections and reminding us of what we’ve forgotten. Like the hybrid chess-playing centaurs, the solution is to let the computers do what they do best while letting humans do what they do best.

      Bradley Rhodes has had a taste of what that feels like. While a student at MIT, he developed the Remembrance Agent, a piece of software that performed one simple task. The agent would observe what he was typing—e-mails, notes, an essay, whatever. It would take the words he wrote and quietly scour through years of archived e-mails and documents to see if anything he’d written in the past was similar in content to what he was writing about now. Then it would offer up snippets in the corner of the screen—close enough for Rhodes to glance at.

      Sometimes the suggestions were off topic and irrelevant, and Rhodes would ignore them. But frequently the agent would find something useful—a document Rhodes had written but forgotten about. For example, he’d find himself typing an e-mail to a friend, asking how to work the campus printer, when the agent would show him that he already had a document that contained the answer. Another time, Rhodes—an organizer for MIT’s ballroom dance club—got an e-mail from a club member asking when the next event was taking place. Rhodes was busy with schoolwork and tempted to blow him off, but the agent pointed out that the club member had asked the same question a month earlier, and Rhodes hadn’t answered then either.

      “I realized I had to switch gears and apologize and go, ‘Sorry for not getting back to you,’” he tells me. The agent wound up saving him from precisely the same spaced-out forgetfulness that causes us so many problems, interpersonal and intellectual, in everyday life. “It keeps you from looking stupid,” he adds. “You discover things even you didn’t know you knew.” Fellow students started pestering him for trivia. “They’d say, ‘Hey Brad, I know you’ve got this augmented brain, can you answer this?’”

      In essence, Rhodes’s agent took advantage of computers’ sheer tirelessness. Rhodes, like most of us, isn’t going to bother running a search on everything he has ever typed on the off chance that it might bring up something useful. While machines have no problem doing this sort of dumb task, they won’t know if they’ve found anything useful; it’s up to us, with our uniquely human ability to recognize useful information, to make that decision. Rhodes neatly hybridized the human skill at creating meaning with the computer’s skill at making connections.

      Granted, this sort of system can easily become too complicated for its own good. Microsoft is still living down its disastrous introduction of Clippy, a ghastly piece of artificial intelligence—I’m using that term very loosely—that would observe people’s behavior as they worked on a document and try to bust in, offering “advice” that tended to be spectacularly useless.

      The way machines will become integrated into our remembering is likely to be in smaller, less intrusive bursts. In fact, when it comes to finding meaning in our digital memories, less may be more. Jonathan Wegener, a young computer designer who lives in Brooklyn,¹⁷ recently became interested in the extensive data trails that he and his friends were leaving in everyday life: everything from Facebook status updates to text messages to blog posts and check-ins at local bars using services like Foursquare. The check-ins struck him as particularly interesting. They were geographic; if you picked a day and mapped your check-ins, you’d see a version of yourself moving around the city. It reminded him of a trope from the video games he’d played as a kid: “racing your ghost.” In games like Mario Kart, if you had no one to play with, you could record yourself going as fast as you could around a track, then compete against the “ghost” of your former self.

      Wegener thought it would be fun to do the same thing with check-ins—show people what they’d been doing on a day in their past. In one hectic weekend of programming, he created a service playfully called FoursquareAnd7YearsAgo. Each day, the service logged into your Foursquare account, found your check-ins from one year back (as well as any “shout” status statements you made), and e-mailed a summary to you. Users quickly found the daily e-mail would stimulate powerful, unexpected bouts of reminiscence. I spent an afternoon talking to Daniel Giovanni, a young social-media specialist in Jakarta who’d become a mesmerized user of FoursquareAnd7YearsAgo. The day we spoke was the one-year anniversary of his thesis defense, and as he looked at the list of check-ins, the memories flooded back: at 7:42 a.m. he showed up on campus to set up (with music from Transformers 2 pounding in his head, as he’d noted in a shout); at 12:42 p.m., after getting an A, he exuberantly left the building and hit a movie theater to celebrate with friends. Giovanni СКАЧАТЬ