Dear Darpa Diary

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

> Dear Darpa Diary
>
> June 5, 2003
> By WILLIAM SAFIRE
>
>
>
>
>
>
> WASHINGTON
>
> Unless you work for the government or the Mafia, it's a
> great idea to keep a diary.
>
> I don't mean the minute-by-minute log that Florida Senator
> Bob Graham keeps in tidy, color-coded notebooks describing
> his clothes, meals and haircuts. That echoes the mythical
> Greek Narcissus.
>
> Rather, I have in mind the brief notation of the day's
> highlight, the amusing encounter or useful insight that
> will someday evoke a memory of yourself when young. Such a
> journal entry - perhaps an e-mail to your encoded personal
> file - can now be supplemented by scanned-in articles,
> poems or pictures to create a "commonplace book." You will
> then have a private memory-jogger and resource for
> reminiscence at family gatherings.
>
> But beware too much of a good thing.
>
> The Defense Advanced
> Research Projects Agency, or Darpa, stimulates
> outside-the-box thinking that has given us the Internet and
> the stealth bomber. On occasion, however, Darpa goes off
> half-cocked. Its Total (now Terrorist) Information
> Awareness plan - to combine all commercial credit data and
> individual bank and academic records with F.B.I. and C.I.A.
> dossiers, which would have made every American's life an
> open book - has been reined in somewhat by Congress after
> we privacy nuts hollered to high heaven.
>
> Comes now LifeLog, the all-remembering cyberdiary. Do you
> know those hand-held personal digital assistants that
> remind you of appointments, store phone numbers and
> birthdays, tip you off to foibles of friends and
> vulnerabilities of enemies, and keep desperate global
> executives in unremitting touch day and night? Forget about
> 'em - those wireless whiz-bangs are already yestertech.
>
> Darpa's LifeLog initiative is part of its "cognitive
> computing" research. The goal is to teach your computer to
> learn by your experience, so that what has been your
> digital assistant will morph into your lifelong partner in
> memory. Darpa is sprinkling around $7.3 million in research
> contracts (a drop in its $2.7 billion budget) to develop
> PAL, the Perceptive Assistant that Learns.
>
> For those who suspect that I am dreaming this up, get that
> lumbering old machine in your back pocket to access
> www.darpa.mil/ipto, and then click on "research areas" and
> then "LifeLog." You are then in a world light-years beyond
> the Matrix into virtual Graham-land.
>
> "To build a cognitive computing system," says proto-PAL, "a
> user must store, retrieve and understand data about his or
> her past experiences. This entails collecting diverse data.
> . . . The research will determine the types of data to
> collect and when to collect it." This diverse data can
> include everything you ("the user") see, smell, taste,
> touch and hear every day of your life.
>
> But wouldn't the ubiquitous partner be embarrassing at
> times? Relax, says the program description, presumably
> written by Dr. Doug Gage, who didn't answer my calls,
> e-mails or frantic telepathy. "The goal of the data
> collection is to `see what I see' rather than to `see me.'
> Users are in complete control of their own data-collection
> efforts, decide when to turn the sensors on or off and
> decide who will share the data."
>
> That's just dandy for the personal privacy of the "user,"
> who would be led to believe he controlled the only copy of
> his infinitely detailed profile. But what about the
> "use-ee" - the person that PAL's user is looking at,
> listening to, sniffing or conspiring with to blow up the
> world?
>
> The human user may have opt-in control of the wireless wire
> he is secretly wearing, but all the people who come in
> contact with PAL and its willing user-spy would be ill-used
> without their knowledge. Result: Everybody would be
> snooping on everybody else, taping and sharing that data
> with the government and the last media conglomerate left
> standing.
>
> And in the basement of the Pentagon, LifeLog's Dr. Gage and
> his PAL, the totally aware Admiral Poindexter, would be
> dumping all this "voluntary" data into a national memory
> bank, which would have undeniable recall of everything you
> would just as soon forget.
>
> Followers of Ned Ludd, who in 1799 famously destroyed two
> nefarious machines knitting hosiery, hope that Congress
> will ask: is the computer our servant or our partner? Are
> diaries personal, or does the Pentagon have a right to
> LifeLog?
>
> And so, as the diarist Samuel Pepys liked to conclude, to
> bed.
>
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/05/opinion/05SAFI.html?ex=1055811309&ei=1&en=718c722b137f6cb1
>
>
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