The most human property of human memory is the ability to forget. To forget selectively and capriciously, depending on mood and age. Memory can free us from the burden of trifles, erase unpleasant episodes and allow us to make the same pleasant discovery many times during our lives.

But there is a computer memory that can remember everything, and there are people who consider the ability to forget a human failing. Researchers at several universities and private companies are looking for ways to make memory and life experience useful everyday tools through lifelogging.

It's pretty much the same as what happens in the cockpit during a flight - all conversations and actions are recorded. Gordon Bell, a 72-year-old American engineer and writer, has been experimenting with lifelogging for five years. He carries a voice recorder and a camera everywhere, saves verbal and telephone conversations, keeps photos of almost everything he sees, speaks his own thoughts, archives all sent and received emails, web pages he visited, scans receipts from stores, menus and bills from cafes, and even records his own movements, saving data from a GPS device that he also carries with him. In just five years - hundreds of gigabytes. Given the rate of development of data storage technology, Bell says in an interview with the New Yorker magazine, in about three years the average human life will be able to fit on a device the size of a mobile phone.

Of course, we are not talking about a technological breakthrough – all technologies are old, they are just improving – but about how to become a bore, never tired of recording your life, and how to use all this junk. Microsoft even announced a competition among researchers who sent in quite a few down-to-earth ideas. For example, you came back to city N after a three-year absence and you can immediately get a list of people you met then, look at the pictures and reread the notes you made then. Another elementary application – monitoring your pulse will help you at a doctor’s appointment, and a program that counts the calories consumed during the day will bother you with reminders about your diet.

The vast amount of data that each person can generate clearly needs more processing. “Computers sit idle most of the time,” Jim Gemmell, a Microsoft researcher who is working with Bell on the MyLifeBits project, told the New Yorker. “But with this kind of archive, they could find coincidences, coincidences, trends, and analyze them to help us.” This means we could create programs that would make our lives incredibly organized and efficient. We would be able to avoid repeating old mistakes, refer others to what we’ve said before, make the most of our own ideas, and generate patterns of our behavior to improve in the future.

There are, of course, privacy issues here and, in general, scope for abuse that there is not enough space to write about in a column. But what about the fact that your entire life is recorded in the first place? Of course, there is the prospect of becoming a super-efficient person by remembering every step and analyzing their sequence. But there is also the fear of remembering every step.

Project "B": Memory Processing