I'm blessed that I grew up in a time where there wasn't a persistent video and audio record of everything I did, every mistake I made, every shenanigan I pulled, every not-so-nice thing I said. Being able to learn and grow, and leave your past in the past is a feature of life, not a bug to be fixed. I feel hopeless for my kid who is growing up in a world where almost everything she does out in public is recorded by someone and something, and will be discoverable and searchable forever.

There are some bizarre notions in here. I used to be a big picture taker at events like concerts, and I realized that I never look at the things. Why? Because a picture can't really capture the "vibe" of being there - worse, not being present in the moment of the concert means the actual, emotionally charged, memories are diluted because I'm paying attention to my phone. Having the picture often made the memory less distinct in my mind, not more.

Even with a more judicious approach to recording though, the second problem was curation. When you get home with tens or hundreds of photos, what do you do with them? In my experience, either (a) you go through them and clear out all the bad ones almost immediately (same week at least) or (b) they sit around forever gathering dust on a drive somewhere. It's not beneficial to have thousands of photos covering every insignificant event in your life (or hundreds of hours of video). Going through all that stuff is slow, boring, and tedious. Our memories are all about culling the details that don't matter and leaving behind what's important. Our brains do this automatically for us, but who is going to do this work with a massive photo collection? Would I trust AI to do it? Probably not.

There's a golden mean here somewhere, where you have enough photos to spark a memory 20 years from now, but not so many that it becomes a chore to capture and curate them. Capturing every moment is definitely not it.

"Expand the surveillance state to unprecedented levels" would be a better title.

I mean seriously? Was this written by an outreach intern at the NSA? I know the world is already going this direction, but holy Christ I'm going to hold out as long as I can from being constantly monitored as I do every little mundane thing through my life.

Do I WANT to remember driving to the store 6 months ago? Do I WANT to remember changing a light bulb 8 weeks ago? There's a reason our brains delete stuff: because most of it is fucking stupid. Why feed this giant malevolent machine even more just so we can have records of all the things nobody gives a flying fuck about?

"History may not repeat itself, but it often rhymes" - Mark Twain https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/mylifebits/

I would record more things but my (i)Cloud storage fees would be huge.

Well the number one problem is… I hate the sound of my voice and hate seeing videos of myself! Maybe I’d get used to it, but I really don’t feel like going through that.

No.

It would be nice to have a personal, both in who is the central character, and who is the only one that can access it, feed of your life.

That is your memory, and it is not perfect, sometimes for the better. But with today technologies, culture and economy factors involved, it will imply more players there. And maybe it won't be ever at our reach, not because technology is not advancing, but because the other factors that are getting more weight.

I do that but for a different reason: to hopefully train a ghost sometime in more or less distant future. I use custom-written software for Windows to record PC activity, an old RealWear device to record outdoors, and built-in Android screen recording for mobile (planning to replace that with custom software as well).

AMA.