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SF writer on life bits
May 14, 2007
SF writer Charlie Stross talks about life bits. Readers of my book Bit Literacy will find my thoughts on life bits in Chapter 13, The Future of Bit Literacy.
From Charlie's Diary: Shaping the future (via bb):
Initially, it'll be edge cases. Police officers on duty: it'd be great to record everything they see, as evidence. Folks with early stage neurodegenerative conditions like Alzheimers: with voice tagging and some sophisticated searching, it's a memory prosthesis.
Add optical character recognition on the fly for any text you look at, speech-to-text for anything you say, and it's all indexed and searchable. "What was the title of the book I looked at and wanted to remember last Thursday at 3pm?"
Think of it as google for real life.
We may even end up being required to do this, by our employers or insurers - in many towns in the UK, it is impossible for shops to get insurance, a condition of doing business, without demonstrating that they have CCTV cameras in place. Having such a lifelog would certainly make things easier for teachers and social workers at risk of being maliciously accused by a student or client.
Bit literate users will know that there are some very big "cons" to go with those "pros." For one thing, there will almost certainly be a company in the middle, mediating the user's access to their own bits... and that company may not have the user's long-term best interest in mind. Considering the importance of the life bitstream, it will be especially risky to lock it in to the wrong company.
See also: Life bits, tracking, and the future (December 2006)
