Yesterday Phil gave us an example of an incident where persistence of information wasn’t working out so well for one person: a former porn star lost a teaching job – for the second time – because of her x-rated past. Increasingly, we live in a world of single chances.
In the future we will video everything. There will be some word for this – maybe we’ll call this llogging, short for “life logging.” We’ll do this so that we can data mine our lives. At TED, Deb Roy had a demonstration of how powerful this can be.
I guess I’ve become a soft old dad. The closing moment where the child walked choked me up a little. Today we lose these incredible moments. On Wednesday’s FastForward Radio we spoke about the power of our technology to make us more human. I see life logging as an important part of this process. We will stop losing ourselves bit by bit to fading memory.
Today we all constantly rewrite our own memories making ourselves more noble, heroic, or – when our lives have really taken a wrong turn – unfairly misunderstood. Having a life log won’t always be pleasant. We won’t be able to fool ourselves anymore. But the ability to replay events, and see objectively how something really happened, will help us become better people. We can learn to live closer to our own ideals.