My thoughts turn to the Alzheimer’s patient. The system would have to record not just the “stuff” of his life, but his emotional response to it as well. It would need an invisible interface — voice recognition maybe to respond to inquiries — and a nearly instantaneous method of communicating back meaningful context. Otherwise he’s Guy Pearce in tats.
Hopefully we’re closer to beating Alzheimer’s than we are to ubiquitous tech-enabled recollection. Hopefully this is academic. (And by the way, Gemmell’s section on MyHealthBits — and Shirky’s popularization of ideas around crowdsourced health records, for that matter — will get us much of the way there.) Secondly, I wonder about the convergence of the Total Recall to come with the Total Access that’s already with us. The potential for interconnectedness between anyone’s and everyone’s lifestreams and the only-slightly-more-objective data cache of unfolding history — in the palm of your hand no less — is, well, paralyzing. So what are you doing?