Your Life Uploaded

The book I read to research this post was Your Life Uploaded by Gordon Bell et al which is an excellent book which I bought from kindle. This book is about a project which they ran at Microsoft called Total Recall where the aim was to be able to store information that was continuously collected throughout ones life by a variety of devices and be able to index it for later recall. Eventually this kind of technology will become a way of life with storage devices like hard drives set to come down in price even more and their storage capacities set to grow exponentially. The Defence organisation in America has also been working on similiar technology to help troops in the theatre of battle. One project was called ASSIST. The main problem facing scientists isn't storing the information but being able to file and index it for later recall. In the next ten years the price of a 1 terabyte memory is set to become the same as a cup of coffee and mobile phones are set to have 250 terabytes of memory. That's 10 years from the publication of this book making it 2020. There are set to be devices in things like clothes that constantly record what we do and the online storage for the data for these devices will in a lot of cases be free. There will of cause be upgrades to paid options. If someone needs information about something there will be implants in their body that will in a lot of cases be able to give them a perfect memory and will provide almost any information he needs. Of course there is a nefarious side to this that will have to be sorted out like if someone breaks the law will this stored information be used as evidence and will people be bombarded by adverts according to what they are thinking about and what has been stored about them. There is also the potential for abuse like can these storage be turned off and can people pay someone to doctor the stored information to make them look innocent of a crime. Also in countries with dictatorships will people be prosecuted for political crimes based on this stored information.