Ted Chiang speech on lifelogging

Lifelogging is an emerging trend of recording every, or nearly every moment of your life. A simple example of lifelogging would be wearing a video recorder that records continuous video and audio of everything you see and do. Ted Chiang used this example to speculate about how lifelogging would change our society. He made carefully balanced points both for external-recording-as-memory, and against. In the end, I think, he is for it. Here are the highlights of his speech.

Even as we might think that a video of our life would never be used as a memory substitute but only as aid, it won't be so. We have been outsourcing our memory for millennia in every way we could. Ancient Greek philosophers complained that writing has corrupted people by weakening their memories; no one could recite thousands and thousands of lines of Iliad or Odyssey anymore. Since then, outsourcing of memory has only picked up pace. We don't remember phone numbers, because we rely on having them stored in our phones; we are less inclined to commit facts to memory, because we can always Google them. So if we have a continuous video of our life, we will come to rely on it instead of our internal memory; it will become, in fact, our memory.

But our memory is not a documentary; it is a web of narratives that get edited every time we remember something. Recalling past events adds layer after layer to our memories, and also distorts them. Most of our memories contain a version of events that pleases us, or lets us see our lives as having a narrative arch. Maybe it lets us to hold on to a thought that our life is getting better in one way or another -- for example, that our love for our spouse grows deeper over time; and that can be useful, because without this illusion we might not have the strength to go on. For example, in a certain study the female participants said they shared as many interests and spent as much time with their husbands as 10 years ago; but the researchers, who had asked the same question of these same women 10 years ago, noted that it wasn't true: the number of shared interests and the amount of closeness had declined.

Ted Chiang gives a speech on lifelogging. More pictures from ArmadilloCon 2014 are in my photo gallery.

As we edit our memories, we are also eliminating those memories that are inconsistent with the way we see ourselves. Ted Chiang gave two examples of famous science fiction writers who had been on the giving or receiving end of it. One of them had misremembered the year of his father's death by 2 years, until fact checkers found an old obituary for his father in the newspapers, and pointed out the inconsistency. The writer provided a hypothesis for that: since his father died just a few months before he started college, and the freshman year of college was a very exciting time for him, his memory simply refused to put those two events in one year. The emotional "tone" of those events was much too dissimilar for them to have happened just months apart.

The other writer in Ted Chiang's example found out, as an adult, that his mother didn't remember beating him with a rope as a child. She denied ever doing that. Again, the way this could be explained is that back in the early 20th century (the time of this writer's childhood) it was acceptable to beat children, but a few decades later it was far less so. So his mother, thinking of herself as a good mother, unconsciously edited out of her memory the episodes of beating her child.

But if we edit out our memories in which we have hurt others, then we are not doing justice to those people; we are denying them their experiences. Similarly, the ruling elite of a nation might be denying the acknowledgement of suffering to the groups in the nation that they had oppressed. The notion of justice -- both interpersonal and on world scale -- requires that we remember our wrongdoings. This was Ted Chiang's conclusion, and this is why he thinks, after all, that lifelogging would be a step in the right direction.

Questions and discussion with the audience

Audience member 1. Forgetting can be very helpful in getting over a trauma; especially forgetting violent events. If we can't forget anything, if our video is there, we might be tempted to go back to those traumatic moments and never make progress in healing.

Ted Chiang responded that these days researchers are working on medicines that help us selectively forget, allowing one to heal from PTSD. (This doesn't quite address the question that selective forgetting won't do you much good if you'll be tempted to go back and revisit the record of violent events. -- E.)

Audience member 2. A certain amount of forgetting goes a very long way in maintaining good relationships with your relatives. When you meet and talk with them only a few times a year, it helps if you had forgotten things they did that made you very angry, or hurt you.

Ted Chiang responded that it would be even better if that person remembered how they wronged you, and be motivated not to do it again.

Audience member 3. What if having a video of all moments of our life would prompt us to live our life as if we are creating a story? When I was in college I deliberately went and did things, had experiences, to have something to write home about. Friday afternoon would come and I would think, oh, I haven't done "anything" this week yet (out of the ordinary) -- I should go be interesting for a couple of hours now!

Ted Chiang responded that this wouldn't be the same as how people these curate their Facebook profiles, posting only those activities that form an image they like. If we don't have to worry about anyone seeing our video, we won't be motivated to appear a good person on the tape.

That last statement hinged on a pretty big assumption, which Ted Chiang stated upfront at the beginning of his talk: that privacy and security issues had been solved, and we don't have to worry about our life record being viewed by the eyes it wasn't intended for. I think Ted Chiang made this assumption only to keep the scope of discussion manageable, not because he thought it would be easy. Still, it was near impossible to discuss lifelogging-as-memory without getting tangled in the issues of privacy, as is evident from the audience's questions.

Audience member 4. What happens when a hacker hacks into the record of your memories? Surely it will happen, because any and every technology that has ever existed has been hacked into.

Ted Chiang. Even if hackers modify your own memories, that wouldn't be the end of the world for you, because any kind of public event would be recorded by at least some other people. So you could compare your memories with theirs, and restore the truth. (This doesn't address the cases when the event is private and nobody else has a record of it; or what if a hacker makes your most private moments public? Or what if you don't even know your memories were tampered with, and thus have no reason to compare them with others' memories? -- E.)

Audience member 5. If everything you do is recorded in the continuous video of your life, then any movie you've seen will also be in it. So who will own that part of the video -- you or the movie studio? If you want to rewatch a movie, would you need to pay to get access to your own memories? If you don't pay, is it piracy?

Ted Chiang pointed out that movie studios are already dealing with similar issues even today, because you can download a movie from the torrents as soon as it comes out on the screen. This won't be that different.

Other audience members asked more questions without good answers. For example, 5th amendment. Police can confiscate your computer records, video records, or any kind of records if they are needed in an investigation of a crime; but if the recording is literally considered to be your memory, they might not have a right to confiscate it, as that would be the same as forcing you to speak. How would the laws, or constitution need to be rewritten in such a case?

A bug in Google Spreadsheets?

A couple of days ago I tweeted my exasperation with Google Spreadsheets. @ronaldho kindly replied to my tweet, asking for clarification. Here is what's happening.

At first Firefox, and then Chrome have been resizing my Google Spreadsheets fonts. Suppose the text in my spreadsheets was originally 10 points. That's a nice size font I can easily read. Then one day, all of a sudden, the browser shrinks the font. It still shows it as 10 pt, but realistically it now looks like 8 pt. That's a bit too small for me. I didn't do anything to cause this. The browser did it not in response to any of my action (intentional or not), but out of the blue. That's right, the browser window with the spreadsheet was just sitting there, untouched, and suddenly the text shrank.

So I select all the text in the spreadsheet and increase it to 12 points. For a while, all is well. Then, a few days later, the browser shrinks the text again! So now 12 points look like 8!

I increase to 14 points. The story continues. It got to where 18-point font started looking like 8.

I was hoping that this was just a Firefox misfeature, so I switched to Google Chrome. At first, the fonts in Google Chrome appeared their correct sizes. Then, after just 2 days of usage, 12-point font shrank a couple of sizes. So, unfortunately, Chrome does it too. This must be a bug in Google Spreadsheets, not in any browser.

(All the fonts in my other Google docs appear correctly, by the way. This bug affects just spreadsheets.)

If this keeps happening, I won't be able to work with Google Spreadsheets anymore. The font sizes don't go higher than 24. When 24-point font starts looking like 6 points, then what? I'll have to drop Google Spreadsheets. That's a shame, because I have lots of useful data there. I gather data for my own life-logging experiments, which I plan to use to test applications I'm writing. (Hence the data mining I was referring to in my tweet, @ronaldho. It has nothing to do with Google Spreadsheets themselves.)

If there is a way to stop Google Spreadsheets from doing this, I would appreciate the tips.

Yet another application contest -- Alcatel-Lucent crowdsourcing at SXSW 2010

Alcatel-Lucent Eleven API lounge at SXSW was a fabulous place to hang out when I didn't have another place to be. Dimly lit, with sleek white couches arranged in a circle resembling a vaguely familiar corporate logo (but not the Alcatel-Lucent logo, so perhaps the similarity was incidental) it had plenty of power outlets to charge laptops and devices. Even better, it had free breakfast and free happy hours with amazing food in the afternoons. At those happy hours Alcatel-Lucent held application pitch contests. People in the room were asked to come up with ideas for software applications that would incorporate content and networking, and describe them in 5-minute pitches.

Such contests are popular at social media events. Last year I wrote about the Half-Baked Game that took place at the Social Media Camp 2008. Most of the ideas proposed at the game were endless, rather uninnovative mashups of existing social networking functionality. Alcatel-Lucent contest was like that too, only more so. Then again, the ideas presented here weren't meant to be taken seriously.

As people pitched, an artist wrote down the application titles on a white board, creating a graph that resembled a game board. It started out blank and fresh, as seen in the picture below, and ended up full (see bottom picture).

Alcatel-Lucent Eleven API lounge (BTW, that's some random person, not me), and the white board that will fill up with application ideas in the course of the weekend.

Here are some of the ideas.

One guy proposed an application that would capture all the educational content that your child is exposed to, as the child progresses from nursery to preschool to higher levels of education.

Another guy pitched a "build-your-perfect-mate" application. He didn't explain how it would work.

A woman pitched getfriended.com, an application that would help you find friends. "How many of you have ever been new to town?" she asked the audience in a cheerful tone of a motivational speaker lobbing a rhetorical question at the audience. "Did you find it hard to meet new friends?" Nods all around. Her application, she said, would let you meet new friends. Nobody asked her what it would do better than Meetup.com or Facebook, reminding me of the famous headline from The Onion: "Classmates.com employees don't have the heart to tell CEO about Facebook".

Then there were not just one but two guys who pitched two different post-apocalyptic survival applications. Those apps would provide instructions on finding food, shelter, etc. in a primitive environment, such as "how to strangle a sable-toothed tiger with your bare hands". They just neglected to mention where the electricity for your iPhone would come from. No, I didn't say this was a serious contest.

Among all this, I remember somebody proposing an application that sounded like it actually made sense -- it was somewhat innovative and useful. Not surprisingly, it did NOT win, possibly because it took more than 30 seconds for the judges to digest the idea. Unfortunately, I didn't write it down either, because, not fitting in 140 characters, it wasn't tweetable. And then I forgot what it was about.

Finally, some guy had an idea for an anti-search engine: instead of showing you in search results, it will scramble them so no one will find you. We all have people in our lives that we wish used just that kind of search engine, but what's to keep them from using a real one?

However, this lead me to further thinking about search engines, which will be explored in my next post.

By the end of the weekend the white board at Alcatel-Lucent Eleven API lounge all filled up with application ideas, rendered by an artist in the likeness of a game board. Clicking on the link, you can get a big version of the picture and see most of those ideas for yourself. There were many more than what I described in this post.

The guy with the educational experiences-capturing application won. I think his idea is not bad, just hard to implement because it's too vague. Educational content is a very eclectic and unstructured notion, hard to capture in a unified format. Also it would put the burden of collecting such content either on various educational institutions your child would go to (but how would you bring all those institutions on board with this idea?) or on the child himself/herself, which is obviously impossible while he/she is a toddler, but may not be practical even when he/she is older. How many children actually pay attention to the teacher? How can they be expected to capture teacher's every word or scribble in a digital medium? This kind of software falls in the general category of lifelogging, which, to me, is a very interesting area, but few practical applications have come out of it so far.

The educational content guy won some kind of domestic appliance or gadget for his idea, though. The box suggested a toaster, but perhaps not. :-)

How Web 2.0 services empowered the bookworm in me

For the last couple of years, as an organizer of the Science And Religion In Fiction book club at the Center For Inquiry Austin, I've been continuously faced with a nontrivial task of finding books that match the focus of the club. We discuss books that have promiment science or religion themes in them. They aren't all that easy to find, and it's been getting more difficult as the club is nearing its 4th year of existence. All the low-hanging fruit, such as Mary Doria Russell's "Sparrow", Neil Gaiman's "American Gods", or Philip Pullman's "His Dark Materials" trilogy, has been picked. We read mostly fantasy and science fiction, but some mainstream fiction too. Most genre fiction, however, wouldn't qualify for our club's reading list. 98% of science fiction employs science only as "furniture" (e.g. cool gadgets), but we want to read books where science and/or religion is the central theme. It's non-trivial to find them even if you spend hours searching Google or Amazon. I could not think of a right keyword combination to show me just this kind of novels. A simple query like "novels about science" or "fiction about science", would merely return tens of thousands of science fiction titles.

I concluded that my best source for replenishing the list of candidate books for the book club were book reviews. Unfortunately, there is a metric gazillion of book review sites around. You can't limit yourself to just one site, even as distinguished as New York Times book review, because you don't know where you might find one crucial insight that would tell you a particular book would be a good fit for our club. Different reviews focus on different aspects of the book, and they might overlook what's important to us. Then again, a random Amazon.com customer's comment might unintentionally point out a characteristic of the story that makes it a good fit for us.

But there are thousands of book reviews generated every day, and I don't have time to read even a small part of that. So I've been doing it haphazardly, discovering useful reviews by serendipity rather than purposeful search. And then I forget their URLs, and don't know how to get back to them. I tend to remember about them a year or two later, long after they expired from my browser's history. "Oh, haven't I seen a mention of a novel about Einstein? Or a string theorist? What was its title and author?"

This rumination was prompted by a discovery that I had, in fact, saved on my computer an entire New York Times article about a "recent" spat of science-themed novels. It was recent as of 2003, long before the CFI book club was even a glimmer in anybody's eye. I saved it with a vague intention of "reading some of this stuff some day", and then forgot about it. Buried in the hundreds of thousands of other documents on my hard drive, this file was essentially unfindable.

That's why we need lifelogging, I say! But short of complete lifelogging, this particular problem can easily be solved with simple Web 2.0 tools. These days I save such articles, along with all science-themed book reviews I come across, to my del.icio.us bookmarks, and tag it with proper tags. now I have no problem finding them again.

So when people wonder who needs all those millions of online services, I raise my (figurative) hand. del.icio.us, in particular, has been serving as an extension of my brain the way even Google can't.

A brief fantasy of a web application

that I might like to write as a hobby if my day was three times as long...

If your spouse thinks your child is poorly behaved, while you think your child's behavior is fairly good for her age, how do you decide where the truth lies? Is one of you too lax, or does the other has unrealistic expectations for a 3-year-old? The truth may lie in a large scale study that would let one compare their child's behavior against that of thousands of other children of the same age. Where would one easily come across such data? Why, that's where internet and social networks come into play.

There could be a web-based application that allowed a parent to record a child's daily tantrums, as well as episodes of good behavior. Then it could draw various statistical conclusions from those numbers. At the very least it would let a parent to discover where their child falls on the curve of his or her peers. This would, of course, require many parents' participation. They would need to track every instance of their offspring's good or bad behavior: every tantrum, every "please" and "thank you", and so on.

Mind-numbingly tedious? You bet. But, if the latest explosion of social web applications is any indication, people like to do mind-numbingly tedious things, as long as they get to do them on the internet. :-) Well, a certain category of people do. Witness the popularity of Twitter. If people don't get tired of posting what they ate for lunch, some of the same people might become just as obsessive about posting their child's behavioral microupdates. And of course they don't have to be at a computer for that. A text messaging-enabled cell phone is enough.

The internet indeed has a way of converting tedious chores into games. It's a quality that's already been leveraged by such applications as Chore Wars, where players get points for chores they do. Once you get stoked about beating fellow players, you don't even notice that you've finished cleaning your kitchen! Indeed humans (or a certain category of humans) are all about keeping scores. So an application that exploits this urge has a potential to do well.

And let's not forget that parenting is a competitive sport anyway -- so if anyone is inclined to keep scores, parents would be among those people! :-)