Digital memories are disappearing and not even AI or Google can help
- Reference: 1701851533
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2023/12/06/down_the_memory_hole/
- Source link:
All those storage devices are crowded with the rolling backup of my life over the last 20-ish years. Before that, my digital history sits in a twilight – some bits preserved, others lost forever.
Thirty years ago this month I sat down with Tony Parisi to write the first VRML browser, using [3]Reality Lab before Microsoft re-badged it as Direct3D. I [4]found that executable last year (which, props to Microsoft's focus on backward compatibility, still runs on Windows 11). But the source code has vanished completely – lost to some head crash back around 1996.
[5]
After enough such losses I became very conservative and careful. Everything I use is backed up – locally and to the cloud. The contents of computers I owned two decades ago reside as tiny folders in my multi-terabyte drives. I hardly ever lose anything anymore, which is wonderful – or would be, if I could find any of it.
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Google wants us to search for everything – just dump it into a pile and let the search engine sort it all out. That sounds good in theory, but in practice it does not scale to the particular, and personal, and enduring. Not because the search engine fails – but because our human memories, crowded with experience, forget the exact language, or the precise dates, or any of the other criteria which might return an accurate hit.
Unlike the public web, our private data hasn't disappeared beneath a rising tide of AI-generated, SEO-optimized noise. We rely on memory and associative links that are not preserved and therefore cannot be located by any search. Google is simply not human enough to do a good job with our memories.
[8]Software is listening for the options you want it to offer, and it's about time
[9]Go ahead, let the unknowable security risks of Windows Copilot onto your PC fleet
[10]Portable Large Language Models – not the iPhone 15 – are the future of the smartphone
[11]Bad software destroyed my doctor's memory
My lack of effective digital memory has become a serious issue. The amount of information I want to keep track of has grown unmanageably over the last twelve months. The explosive rise in [12]research and [13]applications of artificial intelligence has seen the number of open tabs in my browsers across six computers and mobile devices multiply from a handful into the hundreds. It's an affront to my tidy sense of digital order, a significant drag on browser performance – and a complete necessity.
All of those tabs are important. I just can't really remember what's open anywhere anymore – only that it's open. Somewhere.
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So here I am, presented with a growing bill for twenty-plus years of personal technical debt. Perhaps I should have adopted a system of data cataloging beyond an endless number of folders in Dropbox and Google Drive. But what sort of system would have preserved the associative nature of all of our experiences?
Father-of-the VAX Gordon Bell's [15]MyLifeBits – a project out of Microsoft Research, now 20 years old – considered the capture of experience, but nothing so far has provided an interface to the metadata of that experience. We need more than just time and location and association – it's context and continuity and meaning and mindset, and so much more that we can only barely articulate. Those nearly invisible threads bind us to our memories – both in our heads and in our digital selves.
So where does that leave me? I could magic up a [16]GPT to do some basic analysis and metadata generation for the links I find in my research, the documents I read, and so on – but then what? How do these discrete items of digital memory maintain their context and continuity? How do I thread them together?
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That it's hard to answer this question with any existing tool or technique tells us that we've found a blind spot. What we can't see, we can't move toward. In that darkness, more of our lives-as-context-driven-experience tumble down the memory hole – preserved but continuously fading into meaninglessness.
One of humanity's original technologies – the [18]art of memory – urgently needs a reframing within modern technologies, allowing us to preserve the meaning of our personal past as we move into the future. ®
Get our [19]Tech Resources
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2022/03/24/in_memoriam_stephen_wilhite_john_roach/
[2] https://www.theregister.com/1998/11/03/iomega_proposes_zip_everywhere_strategy/
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_Lab
[4] https://new.markpesce.com/labyrinth
[5] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/storage&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2ZXBUV0qbFW7CAMqLeDNK-wAAAJU&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[6] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/storage&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44ZXBUV0qbFW7CAMqLeDNK-wAAAJU&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[7] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/storage&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33ZXBUV0qbFW7CAMqLeDNK-wAAAJU&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2023/11/15/chat_interfaces_software_options/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2023/10/11/microsoft_expects_it_pros_to/
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2023/09/13/personal_ai_smartphone_future/
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2023/08/16/bad_software_destroyed_doctors_memory/
[12] https://www.theregister.com/2023/09/13/personal_ai_smartphone_future/
[13] https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/15/gpts_in_the_real_world/
[14] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/storage&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44ZXBUV0qbFW7CAMqLeDNK-wAAAJU&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[15] https://www.theregister.com/2003/05/14/my_life_in_a_terabyte
[16] https://www.theregister.com/2023/11/06/openai_gpt4_turbo_copyright_shield/
[17] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/storage&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33ZXBUV0qbFW7CAMqLeDNK-wAAAJU&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[18] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci
[19] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Information evaporation
If I want to look at the Doomsday Book, I basically can. It's historic and tangible and readable by anyone with the correct public hardware (eyes), public software (language) and access to the datastore (library shelf or whatever). A reference to Guam the Testiculate of Goth and the enormous size of his vegetable plot may be inscribed there forever.
Nowadays, a little titbit of information about the size of Horatio Pugh's allotment in 2003 and registered by Boring County Council, is found under a glacier of "more popular, irrelevant but sponsored hits" on page 83 of a Google search - if you are lucky. More likely, that reference is encoded in some kind of inaccessible archived database format which is never going to be interrogated by a search engine so it will never to see the light of day again, even if you could find something to read a .p34R format file, and under GDPR shouldn't data that old be deleted anyway?
In essence, as more and more contemporaneous information piles in, the old information evaporates away, unnoticed, into the information aether. The similarity to an information black hole is significant.
Preserve the meaning of our personal past
Do we really need to?
The archive of my earliest digital forays was largely on green bar paper and punched cards. It gradually got reused for sketching flow charts and code fragments and leaving notes for the milkman. Did it have any value other than as an occasional source of nostalgia? Almost certainly not. I have electronic records of a lot more since, but most of it has no intrinsic interest even to me.
There was a period when slide projectors were fashionable when almost every sitcom had an episode in which the protagonists were forced to sit through an interminable exhibition of their neighbours' holiday snaps - famous landmarks obscured by one or other determinedly grinning face. I think we're frequently guilty of the digital equivalent.
Just because we can store stuff doesn't mean we should. People who hoard physical items, filling their homes to their own exclusion, are rightly considered to need help. The expanding capacity of digital storage may simply be concealing our propensity to overestimate the significance of our existence.
I have some stuff that I have specifically set aside for future generations - photos of relatives going back to the late Victorian period, for example - but most of the rest will evaporate with my own demise and if it were to vanish sooner it would not be a tragedy.
A strikingly important article
The subject of our memories is a very important one, and we're nowhere near a proper solution.
I agree that file storage works, but file retrieval is indeed a thorny subject - made worse when the storage medium differs the older the file date.
I also have a collection of DVDs, HDDs and now BluRay discs that I store my digital life on. When VHS went out of style, I used my living room DVD player with hard drive to convert from VHS to MP4 and voilà, all those files went to DVD storage (and are now also backed up on BluRay). What happens when switch to crystal cubes with yottabytes of storage ? I'll be copying all of that to the cube, of course.
And then what ? My data organization isn't terrible, but if I absolutely had to find that school programming project, I'm not sure I could do that in a single day. Might take me more than a day or two to go through all those DVD labels to guess, or check, the right one. And yes, I have an index. Somewhere. Going to have to find that as well, but I think I know where it is.
So yeah, I'm rather looking forward to the day I can just ask my robot butler for that project folder I saved in 1998 and see the folder appear on my whatever-a-PC-will-be-by-then.
And then I'll check the contents, find that they are useless and chuck the folder to the bin.