In late 2001, Gordon Bell, a computer scientist consultant, volunteered to be the subject of MyLifeBits, a life-logging experiment run by computer scientists Jim Gemmell and Roger Lueder for Microsoft.įor 17 years running, Bell has digitized and saved, well, everything. It took nearly 70 years for the tech to catch up to Bush's vision. Of course, 1940s technology wasn't up to the task of recording a person's every conversation and everything they read. Memex, Bush wrote in The Atlantic in 1945, would be 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." Read more: The Army Is Working on Brain Hacks to Help Soldiers Deal With Information Overload In 1945, a government scientist named Vannevar Bush described an idea he termed "Memex." It was, in some ways, a prescient flash forward to smartphones. The ideas behind LifeLog are much, much older than the program itself. A failed military cyber-diary from 15 years ago was, in a way, a preview of our smartphone-addicted, Facebooking, government-surveilled present.Īt the same time, LifeLog was "a cautionary tale regarding privacy controversies,” its creator Douglas Gage told me during a series of phone and email interviews. Barely a year after it began, the LifeLog program abruptly ended, effectively shamed out of existence by privacy-advocates and the media.Īnd then, over the following decade, much of what LifeLog aimed to achieve happened, anyway. But today, it's just a footnote in tech history. LifeLog arguably was years ahead of its time. It was potential all-seeing government surveillance before anyone worried about the NSA or had heard of Edward Snowden. LifeLog was an iPhone before there were iPhones, social media before there was social media.
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