Will You Record Your Entire Life?

Lifelogging – recording every single minute of your life – is quickly moving from science fiction fantasy to real life phenomenon.  Of course to truly document every minute of your life today is still a daunting task.  Although some people are already doing it, full lifelogging is time consuming, expensive, and limited in quality.  But logging every single minute of your life is not the only way to lifelog.  Each video, each picture, each email we create everyday is another piece of the puzzle that documents our lives.  If you are like me, you are accumulating more and more of these digital pieces each year.  This trend is accelerating, and within ten years or less it will be cheap and easy for most of us to record nearly every moment of our lives if we choose to do so.  How much of your life will you choose to record, and how much of your life will be recorded by others?

Technology has already made it so easy to record our lives that many of us might not even appreciate how much is already being recorded.  Gmail, for example, has a record of every single email I have ever sent or received for many years now.  Those of us that maintain online calendars can tell who we were with and what we were doing on any given day for the last several years.  I use my smartphone to capture several photos and videos per day without even thinking about it.  Most chat programs allow you to record and archive every single online chat you have ever had.  And these are just some of the more ubiquitous examples.

For those that want to be more ambitious about their lifelogging, there is a device you can wear  around your neck that will take photos automatically around the clock.  Ucorder makes a video camera that you can snap onto your clothing.  And taking things to the ultimate limit is Justin Kan, founder of Justin.tv, who was originally famous years ago for broadcasting his life 24/7 to the internet for anyone to see.

Being able to explore our recorded past opens the door to a whole new world of possibilities.  Arguments could be resolved by going back in time and seeing who really said what, rather than relying on flawed recollections of what we think we said.  Crime could be revolutionized with recordings of who was doing what and where.  Our entire past could be made accessible – from meaningful conversations with a loved one to trivial encounters with random people or places.  We would rarely forget anything ever again.  When we lose the keys, fail to recollect a desired piece of information, or lose some clarity on what something looked like – all of this can be fixed by looking back into our recorded past.

Our recorded past could be the best (or worst) movie we have ever watched.  We could watch ourselves go to school for the first time, go on our first date with our future spouse, or go to our first job interview.  It is a window into our past, with all it’s glory and blemishes.  Some of these recorded moments won’t be our proudest, but ultimately I think we will gain great value from being able to access our recorded past.

Recording our lives is one thing, but being able to find a particular conversation or image of interest from thousands of hours of footage is a daunting task.  Indeed, our ability to record information today is far ahead of our ability to organize and dig through that information.

The tools for searching through our lifelog are getting better though.  Video and images almost always have a timestamp associated with them, so programs like Google’s Picasa are easily able to sort your lifelog by date.  Software has recently made impressive strides in being able to automatically recognize and tag faces within images, making it possible to search for all images with a particular person in them.  Devices with a GPS such as the iphone are now able to associate a location with your images and videos.  This means it is now trivial to sort those recordings by location and then view them on a map.  See below for an example of how an iphone does this:

Map where pictures/videos were taken on an iphone

But ultimately what we really need is something much more sophisticated than “sort by date” or “sort by location”.  What you want to do is say “computer, please pull up the conversation I had with Dr. James about longevity a few years ago.”  Such a capability is not here yet, but the foundation for its creation is already in the works.  When you consider voice recognition technology and automatic speech to text translation that exists today, it is not unreasonable to expect Star Trek quality access to digital records in 10-20 years.

Even though the tools to search our lifelog are still lacking, this does not mean that those who are interested in lifelogging should stop their efforts.  Lifelogging can begin now, and we can count on the ability to effectively dig through that lifelog in the future.  Already I am lifelogging more each year.  At my current rate, I am easily capturing several photos and videos per day.  Even with this incomplete lifelog, when you stitch it all together it allows me to showcase an unprecedented digital diary of a single person’s life.

For my children, this lifelog is growing into an invaluble record of what they looked like, what they said, where they went, and what they were capable of during any day of their youth.  I am not just recording the “big moments” like their first steps or their first words.  Conversations, playing games, jokes, falls, fails, arguments, discoveries, crying fits…the minutae of daily life are all being recorded for my children and their loved ones to look back upon when they are older.

Many will say that such a massive lifelog of information is a useless pile of data.  But this is very shortsighted thinking.  When given the chance to view a video record covering years or even decades of our lives, I am pretty sure we all would find plenty of reasons to want to look back.  Besides, given how cheap and easy it is becoming to record a lifelog, the debate about the usefulness of a lifelog can mostly be ignored.  If you use the lifelog – great.  If you don’t use it, then it didn’t cost you much to record it anyway.

Although lifelogging unleashes fascinating ways for us to explore our past, it also exposes us to possible embarrassment, or even worse – trouble with the law.  It is a double edged sword, yet this is no different than with our actions that take place in the present time frame.

We all accept that actions we take in the present time frame are subject to negative consequences, but this doesn’t make us not want to live in the present.  For most of us, the same will be true for recording our past – the benefits we gain from being able to retrieve our past will far outweigh the risk we face for our past actions.  This is especially true if we consider that we will have full control over who can and cannot access our recorded lives.  That is, unless our hand is forced by the real risk of a search warrant or a security breach.  We will each have to decide for ourselves how to balance those risks as we record more and more of our lives.

The future of first dates?

As lifelogging becomes more prevalent, we will see that the book is yet to be written on the etiquette and law surrounding when we can and cannot record things.  Is it appropriate to record your first date with someone?  Would the two of you both be comfortable with having such a moment on record?  That choice will be up to the two of you.  Would a corporation really allow you to record your job interview with them?  Probably not, and the law will likely support the corporation on that choice.  It will be interesting to see how different individuals and entire cultures evolve to accept or deny the invasion of video recording into our daily lives.

As recording our lives continues to get easier and cheaper to perform, most of us find ourselves lifelogging more and more – taking more photos, recording more videos, sending more emails.  The trend is unstoppable.  Some of us will embrace lifelogging more quickly and more openly than others, but ultimately we are all moving in a similar direction.  The gains to be had from these detailed records of our lives are fascinating, but the threat to our privacy is very real.  I for one, tend to embrace inevitability rather than fight it, so I will continue to increase my lifelogging as technology makes it easier and cheaper for me to do so.  If you ever see me in person beware – it will probably be recorded.

Image Credits: kk.org, encentra.com

No, it’s not a LEGO space station. This is ARES, the self-assembling robot you may someday have to swallow.

Medical robots are advancing at phenomenal speed, and within years micro-sized robots could be assisting surgeons with operations from inside their patients. Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna’s CRIM Lab in Italy has developed a robot called ARES (Assembling Reconfigurable Endoluminal Surgical System) that will be assembled inside the human body. This modular design is leading the way for a new breed of device that may one day take the place of our most trusted surgeons’ hands. ARES may only be a concept at present, but the project represents amazing new possibilities in the field of robotic surgery.

Engineers behind the ARES project are thinking up ways to bypass external surgery altogether—by operating from within the patient. The ARES robot was designed to self-assemble inside the body after patients swallow up to 15 parts. Using a modular approach, each of these parts would have its own role to play—image control, communications, structural functions and diagnostics, among others—while forming whatever the structure needed to carry out a particular operation. Weighing in at 5.6g, each module is 15.4 mm in diameter and 36.5 mm in length, and each represents a single pill to be ingested by the patient. Computer simulation would be essential to determine setup for each operation; medical data including scanned images would allow doctors to test procedures before selecting the appropriate modules.

ARES poking around in a human stomach.

Patients would ingest liquid prior to the operation in order to distend the stomach. Once inside, ARES would be assembled at the intervention site—magnetic assembly is currently on the drawing board—and disintegrate or be expelled naturally once the operation is over. The program is currently focusing on the digestive tract—a logical site due to its relative size to the robot. If this type of surgery is to work elsewhere in the body, modules will have to be a lot smaller.

Current robotic devices, like the Da Vinci, make surgery less invasive, but controlling robosurgeons on the outside still requires external incisions. Benefits of an ARES style system include avoiding incisions and minimizing pain, expediting patient recovery. Also, modules would be able to excise biopsy samples from the body to be examined post-op. Then there’s increased mobility. This new breed of medical robot could one day emulate biological organisms like insects and bacteria, in order to travel more freely through our bodies. And because ARES would be present in the body’s natural environment, diagnostics would be less limited than those run using traditional optical methods.

If successful, the prototype will inspire new designs, including other ingestible robots made to enter the body through natural orifices, or those injected through tiny incisions. The same scientists developing ARES in Italy have also produced the ‘spider pill’—a camera in a pill doctors can navigate using remote-controlled legs (something new for camera pills). Even if the thought of spiders crawling inside of you is a bit disturbing, this is real progress. Go to 0:17 to see a brief shot of the ARES concept in the video below:

Capsule endoscopy (the technology that uses swallowed video capsules) has been successfully used for years, but despite its progress, actually using these systems could be difficult. New robotic procedures deprive surgeons of their sense of touch, which creates a ‘blind spot’ for sensing tension and pressure. Ingestible robot surgery puts robots further out of grasp—the only connection being a screen facsimile of the patient’s interior. While haptic technology may eventually solve sensory deprivation in the operating room, no usable methods exist. Novel computer systems require professionals to adopt new approaches to familiar situations and, with the case of ingestible robots like ARES, concerns with citotoxicity and other biocompatibility issues will most-likely stall development. Also, it hasn’t been determined as to how these robots will exit the body once operations are completed. What potentially hazardous elements might these robots leave behind?

Regardless, becoming skilled in robotic surgery is the most promising way for surgeons to address their human limitations. If successful, the ARES project would greatly impact the future of surgery. There’s only two real questions: How long will this revolutionary method take to develop?  And, will the pills come in red and blue?

[image credit: ARES Project SSSA]
[video credit: BBC]
[source: BBC, ARES NEST, Professional Engineering Publishing]

What if people all over the world randomly decided to setup motion detection webcams and then send feeds from these webcams to a single website that would centralize the video data for anyone to search, view, and manipulate?  Hot off of the heels of our story yesterday about the implications of cameras recording everything in our lives comes a website called Ugolog that does exactly this.  The concept is both spooky and captivating all at once.  The privacy implications are just out of control, opening the door to all sorts of immoral and illegal invasions of people’s privacy.  On the other hand, the power and usefulness of such a network is extremely compelling.

When you go to the Ugolog website you are immediately impressed with the simplicity of the site (I sure hope they keep it this way!).  No advertisements, no stupid gimmicks, no complicated interface.  The site offers a bare bones, yet elegant design that allows you to do one thing quickly and easily: setup a motion detecting webcam and send the feed to Ugolog.  No software is required, only a web browser and a properly configured camera.  Don’t know how to setup the camera?  No problem!  The site has tutorials that tell you everything you need to know.  Once Ugolog has a feed from one or more of your cameras, the data will be available for you and anyone else in the world to view along with all of the other feeds on the site.

Photo From Ugolog "how to build a spy camera" manual

No big deal, many will say!  Its just like Justin.tv – the website that already carries thousands of live video feeds from all over the world, boasting more than 80,000 simultaneous viewers earlier today.  Yet if you think about this a bit more, you will see that there is indeed a difference between Ugolog and Justin.tv.  The difference is their focus – the type of content that the two sites will offer.

Justin.tv offers all sorts of video feeds, including news, sports, random idiots doing stupid random things, and pretty much anything else you can imagine.  This is a useful and powerful model, yet Justin.tv’s focus on serving up all kinds of video leaves it open to attack by more narrowly focused sites.  Ugolog focuses only on surveillance video.  By targeting this specific category of video the site just might be able to carve out a unique niche in the online video space that can really gain some traction.  Justin.tv could of course create a category on its site called “surveillance”, but a category on Justin.tv devoted to the surveillance might have difficulty competing with Ugolog’s website, community, and employees devoted completely to surveillance.

Highlighting the specialization available on the site Ugolog founder Alexander Uslontsev says “Compared to sites like Justin.tv and Ustream.com, that work with webcam only, Ugolog works with webcams AND ‘professional’ security cameras that can upload pictures via FTP or HTTP. In this case Ugolog acts only as ‘dropbox’ for images and expects all motion detection and scheduling to be done in camera.”

Ugolog is in beta now and has only recently launched, but the site could easily take off like a rocket in a short amount of time.  The idea is powerful.  The site is easy, simple, and free.  Add this all up and you have a solid recipe for explosive growth in users and content.

Success is not guaranteed, however.  Explosive growth can be its own curse, being extremely difficult and expensive to keep up with.  Video is especially resource hungry and may keep the folks over at Ugolog (and their wallets) quite overwhelmed.

Another potential stumbling block is the intense legal scrutiny that the site will certainly encounter.  We can envision massive feeds of video that invade privacy and break the law showing up on the Ugolog website, creating a virtual feast for lawyers everywhere.  One way around this legal mess is probably to allow comprehensive controls over who can see what.  Indeed, this appears to be the case at the moment, as most (all?) feeds seem to be currently viewable only by the owner.  Yet clearly in the future it will take only the click of a single checkbox to “open a feed” to the public.

Focusing on the positive side for a moment, there are several interesting applications that can come from a site like Ugolog.  One such application would be the fulfillment of truly legitimate surveillance needs.  Ugolog allows individuals to quickly setup a powerful surveillance system for their own homes.  Taking this a step further, perhaps a neighborhood would setup its own surveillance network to increase safety and monitor for theft and other crimes.  Consider also more academic applications, such as researchers setting up cameras to monitor glacier growth, animal species patterns, and so on.

Of course the negative and destructive potential of surveillance a la Ugolog is hard to deny.  Yet whether we like it or not, ubiquitous video is here to stay.  We are increasingly likely to fall under the surveillance of one or more cameras multiple times throughout the day.  Ugolog may come and go, but the trend cannot be stopped.  Fight the trend if you want, but I for one intend to embrace it!

Or, more importantly: does that thought make you nervous? You might want to get used to it. As camera technology gets better and better, it’s also getting smaller and cheaper. Digital cameras – a novelty item as little as a decade ago – now surround us wherever we go. They’re built into our phones and our laptops. They watch over our homes and businesses, our ATM withdrawals, and every major intersection of our cities. That red light you blew last week? The ticket is in the mail.

The Mini DV

Take the Mini DV, the self-proclaimed “world’s smallest video camera” rolled out in Hong Kong this month. About the size of your thumb, it captures up to 8 gigs of video feed and boasts an impressive 2-megapixel resolution. It has a two-hour battery life, and uploads your adventures via USB 2.0. It even clips to your clothing so you can show your friends exactly how “dope” your skydiving trip was.

But the ubiquity of digital cameras isn’t just changing how we document Spring Break. It’s changing how news breaks. The first on-site images of the Mumbai terror attacks last year didn’t come from the BBC or Associated Press; they came from Flickr, with front line coverage by amateur photographers. When Oscar Grant was killed by a police officer on New Years Day, digital video in the hands of Oakland subway passengers captured the tragedy first-hand – and made CNN.

The implications get complicated, and fast.

On the one hand, it puts a certain power back into the hands of everyday people. Champions of web 2.0 praise the bottom-up nature of this new media – after all, what better way to capture the truth than by the democratic method of public participation? We all become pseudo-reporters, blogging and uploading the view from the streets. Sexual harassment lawsuit?  Ladies and gentlemen, I direct your attention to YouTube exhibit A.

London street artist Banksy

But what ever happened to good old American privacy? After all, you blew that red light when no one was around… shouldn’t you get away with it? I spoke with Dr. Richard Doyle, a Penn State professor who studies bioethics and technology, about the risks of these new technologies.  “Yes, they are a danger, though of course privacy is itself as much a product of technology (think of the envelope) as publicity is,” he said. Doyle emphasized that these technologies can also offer a new form of anonymity, what he calls peer-to-peer privacy networks. “The technologies and their governance are still emerging, so now is the time to work towards maximizing creative anonymity as well as trying to ‘protect’ privacy.”

I see his point. After all, Flickr doesn’t ask for a social security number before you upload pictures of your new bong. Anonymity is built into web 2.0, and it offers us a new kind of freedom when we upload home-made media. Still, aren’t we always on both sides of the camera? This seems to be the fundamental paradox of these emerging technologies: on the one hand, the creeping paranoia of a surveillance state, and on the other, the newfound freedoms that come with a camera in your pocket at the right moment. Doyle called it “a surreal mixture of total transparency and radically increased anonymity.”  Surreal, indeed.

So will every living moment of our lives soon be on the record?  Maybe someday, you won’t need to wait until your deathbed to have your life flash before your eyes; you can just consult your video archives.  And what are the legal implications of a a fully recorded human life? What if life-filming became a mandatory legal precaution? Sure, you could always prove your alibi, but what if you failed to record last Friday night?  Trying to hide something?  Hmmmm? The legal world is constantly playing catch-up with accelerating technologies (e.g. should Craig Ventor be allowed to patent DNA?)… The time is coming to decide how we think ubiquitous audiovisual recordings should fit into the landscape of our legal system.

Even if we so desired, could we put some restrictions on how and where these technologies deploy?  “Restricting and regulating these technologies is unlikely to be any more successful than Hollywood and the RIAA attempting to restrict the sharing of mp3 and videos,” says Doyle. “Those of us concerned and interested in these emerging technologies should instead work toward bringing the maximum collective intelligence and creativity to bear on their use.”

So tomorrow, and the day after, you’ll see (or won’t) a few more eyes in the sky. They’ll be watching you, but that’s okay. You can watch them right back.  Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a traffic ticket to pay.

The prosthetic eye features a tiny CMOS camera – 1.5mm square to be exact.  The video signal transmits wirelessly, picked up by an external RF Transmitter smaller than the tip of a pencil eraser. The entire “bionic” package feeds off lithium polymer battery technology, and the data could be sent and recorded to a backback enabled storage device.

To be clear, the eyeborg project is not trying to give sight back to the blind (see the Argus II project for that).  Rather, the objective is simply to create a video recording device that will be implanted into the eye for 24/7 life streaming.  Of course several other projects, notably Justin.tv, already offer this capability.  The Eyeborg project is unique, however, in performing surveillance truly from an individual’s line of sight and also because it explores the implications of a future where our body parts can be augmented to exceed their natural capabilities.

Interestingly it is the privacy implications, not the technology, that may be of most interest to people who encounter the Eyeborg project.  Even though several countries such as Canada and the UK have installed tens of thousands of cameras to monitor their citizens, people categorize surveillance from an individual differently…and they should.

Government surveillance cameras are typically installed in public places and in theory their are restrictions on how and when this video can be used.  But a person equipped with a 24/7 recording device can record you whenever they are in your presence…in your home, at your work, at a bar…anywhere, and the restrictions for what they can do with this data are wide open.

Eyeborg raises the specter of a world where recording devices are all around us without our knowledge.  A camera phone is pretty hard to hide, but a 1.5mm camera hiding behind someone’s eye or embedded into clothing or furniture can be impossible to spot.  Science fiction has fathomed a total surveillance society for decades, but now increasingly that day is becoming a reality.

Something to consider is the  fact that various individuals all over the world are undoubtedly already using miniaturized technology to record video and audio without our knowledge.  Tiny 1.5 mm video cameras are a commodity device, and we are fooling ourselves if we think that terrorists, porn freaks, and the like haven’t already installed countless instances of these things in hotel rooms and elsewhere.

One interesting datapoint: If the carelessness with which today’s youth protects its privacy in places like Facebook and Second Life is any indication, future generations will be quite comfortable with further invasions of their personal privacy.  This is a natural adaptation to a new reality that is unavoidable.  Like it or not, surveillance of our lives is an ever increasing phenomenon, and as they say “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em”.