Your Life, Uploaded: The Digital Way to Better Memory, Health, and Productivity

by C. Gordon Bell, Jim Gemmell

A marvelous job of exploring first hand the implications of storing our entire lives digitally.
-Guy L. Tribble, Apple, Inc.

Tech luminary, Gordon Bell, and Jim Gemmell unveil a guide to the next digital revolution. Our daily life started becoming digital a decade ago. Now much of what we do is digitally recorded and accessible. This trend won't stop. And the benefits are astonishing.

Based on their own research Bell and Gemmell explain the ever- increasing access to electronic personal memories-both cloud services such as Facebook and huge personal hardrives. Using Bell as a test case, the two digitally uploaded everything-photos, computer activity, biometrics-and explored systems that could best store the vast amounts of data and make it accessible. The result? An amazing enhancement of human experience from health and education to productivity and just reminiscing about good times. And then, when you are gone, your memories, your life will still be accessible for your grandchildren...

Your Life, Uploaded is an invaluable guide to taking advantage of new technology that will fascinate and inspire techies, business people, and baby boomers alike.

Genres: Nonfiction, Personal Development, Technology

304 pages, Paperback

First published October 26, 2010

Reviews

[David Roberts · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Frederick Gault · Rating 2 out of 5]

There are some good bits, but this book is badly dated. Most of the links referenced are no longer working, the products recommended are gone, the companies doing things of interest mostly gone too. It's good to scan because the general concepts are still relevant, but anyone embarking on a project to create a digital archive should look further for up-to-date information. This is an domain where advances occur rapidly.

[Youssef Assad (يوسف اسعد) · Rating 2 out of 5]

could not finish it, outdated concept

[Mark Koester · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some interesting concepts here and there but felt dated and preachy. As someone who tracks their life in various dimensions, I think this felt more like data obsession or collector's fallacy. The guy tracks and digitalizes everything but doesn't really show much for it. At least not yet.