IEEE Future Directions
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Life-logging, the idea of recording our life moments, goes back to several decades (Vannevar Bush: the quantified self, 1945) but it has become “feasible” in the last fifteen years.
Probably the most famous life-logger was Gordon Bell, a Microsoft researcher emeritus now retired, that started wearing a camera around his neck back in the year 2000 recording his life moments in pictures (at 30 seconds intervals).
The idea of life-logging through images has been picked up by Facebook that is now providing a sort of videoclip containing the photos posted during the last year, and it is also being used by in a number of jobs to record/monitor activities (e.g. several policemen in the US are using a video camera to record their activity).
Both of these applications, however, are not really life-logging, just partial application of the idea.
The problem with life-logging is making sense of the huge number of pictures that are collected. This is where the Google Clips camera comes in.
Announced in October 2017 is likely to become available in Spring 2018. It has been designed to take photos of what is going on and to sort them using artificial intelligence to keep only those that will be of interest.
Of course the crucial point is: how can it determine what will be of interest? Google has teamed up with professional photographers to train the “Clips” to recognise what makes a photo “memorable” singling it out from many others and storing it for future use.
We can expect interesting evolution in this area, made possibile by the huge amount of storage that is available at very low cost and by the easiness of taking photos through embedded cameras (wearable ones) and of course through our smartphones and the ones of our friends that are “tagging” us.
The crucial bit, however, will be provided by artificial intelligence that on the one hand will help sorting out among the millions of photos potentially taken to store a meaningful subset, and then to help retrieving the ones that matter when it matter.
Notice that this opens up a can of worm. One of the great capabilities that we have is the one of “forgetting” things. A life where we would remember any single fragment of our experience will not be a good one (just think about the pains that we have been going through being represented over and over…). A life-logging has to strike a -difficult- balance between remembering and forgetting and this goes beyond artificial intelligence, it relates to who we are. We would be a different person if we would remember it all!
On a less basic level, part of our social life is based on fading memories, it may give you pleasure to have a photographic proof to show your boss that you actually got it right three years ago and he was wrong… but that is not going to make your relationship with him any better…
Having a life-logging at our fingertips is shifting us closer to human 2.0, it is not about technology, it is about ourselves.
I am really fascinated by the implications arising from the spreading out of artificial intelligence, implications that we need to manage, and that we are not yet prepared to do.
The Clips is now available for order in the US with expected delivery date end of February – March