Stephen Wolfram is a famous computer scientist/physicist (though not everyone is a fan) who is behind the Wolfram Alpha search engine. He recently released some analysis of data he’s been collecting about his personal computing and productivity habits since the early 1990’s.
Although MetaFilter has its usual snark in talking about this release (“All that data and all he reveals is he doesn’t send e-mail when he’s asleep? Big deal!”), personally, I think this is a glimpse of our inevitable future – a future I’ve already talked about (but cant’ find the post(s) now – obviously, my archives aren’t as efficient as Mr. Wolfram’s!) where we all have technologies on us all the time that record our every movement, our every transaction, our every experience.
That’s obviously incredibly scary but, as I said, I think it’s also inevitable given the way our society is going with our changing notions of privacy, with people carrying devices that have the potential to pretty much make this happen already and the continuing rapid advances in technology, processing and storage capabilities.
All that’s missing right now from this idea is something that is truly “always-on”, “has enough space to video your daily life”, “cloud service to make it all searchable/analyzable” and once we have that, Mr. Wolfram will likely be seen as a trailblazer in yet another area of computing.
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