Why nobody uses the “L” word anymore
People talked a lot about "lifelogging" when it was impossible. Once it became possible, everybody stopped using the word.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says the ideal version of ChatGPT would be something you could “put your whole life into,” including “every conversation you’ve ever had in your whole life, every book you’ve ever read, every email you’ve ever read, everything you’ve ever looked at” — plus “all your other data from other sources.”
Armed with all that data, your personalized version of AI would give you actionable insights, photographic memory, and general AI help vastly more capable than today’s uncustomized chatbots.
Wow. What a breathtaking vision Altman invented.
Except he didn’t invent it. Vannevar Bush did.
Bush was an American engineer, inventor, and science administrator best known for heading almost all of America’s World War II military research and development, including key advances in radar and the early administration of the Manhattan Project.
Bush talked about his invented concept in a 1945 Atlantic article. He wrote:
“Consider a future device for individual use… in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. Associative indexing, the basic idea of which is a provision whereby any item may be caused at will to select immediately and automatically another. The process of tying two items together is the important thing.”
In 2001, computer scientists Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell envisioned a future where our lives would be seamlessly captured, organized, and made useful by advanced software, turning memory itself into a searchable database. They coined “lifelogging” and described the concept in their influential book, Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything. And Bell tried to make it happen with the MyLifeBits project at Microsoft Research.
In the 80s and 90s, a gaggle of far-flung researchers tried to make lifelogging happen, using huge camera helmets, bulky battery backpacks, and other ill-advised gear.
Even the Pentagon tried to kick-start lifelogging in 2003.
I interviewed Bell in 2016 and learned during that interview that he had given up. The advent of the smartphone had made the quantity of data overwhelming, without software able to sift through all that data.
I concluded in that article that a coming “revolution in artificial intelligence should be able to eventually organize all our captured data, freeing us from the dread of information overload and the need to manage huge data sets. We’ll interact with our data using future versions of Siri-like virtual assistants.”
And that’s exactly what Altman is talking about.
Since OpenAI started the public’s relationship with LLM-based AI chatbots, multiple lifelogging projects have emerged using that technology.
My friend Leo Laporte, who runs the TWiT podcast network, wears a gadget called Bee Pioneer from Bee.Computer. The Bee Pioneer can be worn on a black plastic wristband that looks like a fitness tracker, but the small module can also be worn as a pendant or clip-on. Maria de Lourdes Zollo and Ethan Sutin launched it this year for $50. The device has sensitive microphones that pick up everything you and people near you say. It streams audio to your phone, which sends it to Bee’s AI service. The audio is never saved; instead, the AI turns speech into text, makes daily summaries, lists facts about you, and suggests to-dos based on what it hears.
And many other products and initiatives have been launched recently.
Still, with all these lifelogging products and initiatives, nobody uses the “L” word to describe them.
Instead, they use “personalization,” “personal analytics,” “quantified self,” “digital journaling,” “life tracking,” “life caching,” “self-tracking,” “memory augmentation,” or “egocentric vision.”
It turns out that “lifelogging,” especially around privacy and surveillance, carries outdated, technical, and sometimes negative connotations. This is especially true after the Pentagon’s foray into what they called “LifeLogging,” a concept later associated with the phrase “Total Information Awareness.”
And so we find ourselves in a strange place: “Lifelogging” is dead. But actual lifelogging is just coming into existence.
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