My review of Total Recall: How The E-Memory Revolution will Change Everything

Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell authored Total Recall (ISBN: 978-0-525-95134; http://totalrecallbook.com/) and it was recently published (Sep 2009). I ordered my hardback copy from Amazon.com. It was delivered to my home Sat, 17 Oct 09. I read the foreward by Bill Gates and Chapters One and Two so far. Eager to see the layout and graphics, I flipped through the book and was disappointed by the absence of graphs, tables, and charts. Hoping to reuse some ontological modeling artifacts, I purchased the book certain it would contain some samples of artistic design to ingest, query and/or output points and patterns of one's life. Oh well, the writing style is great--conversational, simple, and light hearted.

Something in Chapter one lead me back to Wired.com's article on Gordon but I clicked on a couple of related links at the bottom of the web page this time. And to my surprise, I read a couple of articles Wired.com wrote on the 2003 DARPA LifeLog project that was never awarded because of public criticisim--privacy and big brother concerns if the technology developed was to proven to be successful. The Pentagon even had its version of LifeLog project, PAL, in the same year. So I checked the index in Total Recall to see if Gordon and Jim acknowledged these efforts and compares the Broad Area Announcements that explain the projects objective to potenial bidders. If you read this post last night, I wrote there was not a reference to DARPA's LifeLog Project. Well I read Chapter Four - Work this morning before going to my office and sure enough, Gordon writes about the DARPA's LifeLog project and names the New York Times reporter who wrote the magazine article that sparked a public outcry over the BAA.

When I conceptualized LifeGraphs, I never considered vacuuming up the digitized inputs that my visual, auditory and tactical senses experience because doing so is outside my paradigm of a mobile mirror world, which is founded on ownership. I see way more things than I own. The same goes for what I hear and touch. I do forsee Virtual Environment and Augmented Reality Cloud-like services that will provide the mirror objects that are adjacent and in proximity for a given date-time group to ones mirror world. I think the complexity of LifeGraphs is less than LifeLogs because LifeGraphs as a system of integrated information flowing over interoperable electronic exchanges (e.g., INTERNET), pushes the harmonization of ontological models of traded and computer-aided designed goods and services on the commerical entities of digital content creation versus the end user. After reading the internet archive of the DARPA BAA 03-30, I can see how the LifeLog innovation and/or inventions in Cognitive Science and AI seek to put a reasoning algorithm at the sensor head or close to it.