This story does not have anything to do with Islam per se. But its intriquing to consider the religious possibilities. If you are orthodox Muslim, how about instantly downloading the Qur’an and Sunnah to have on instant recall when you go through your day. As a Sufi, all poems of Rumi and Hafez memorized. Maybe put a Zekr on loop as a mental background task while you work and sleep. Your digital personality can have a pervasive presence that can be downloaded and transferred via the internet with little concern for time & space. You could make the hajj once a day or more if you like.
Well, we aren’t there yet obviously. But if you look at tech trends, you can see that all the parts are beginning to assemble in that direction. Cheap and large scale micro memory. Intelligent search engines. fMRI scanning. Human-Computer Interface advancement and AI improvements which have been delivered by the gaming industry. I wonder if Wii has a Salat implementation yet.
Here is a little more.
![brain_scan[4]](http://talkislam.info/files/2009/09/brain_scan4-150x150.jpg)
(CNN) — For the past decade, Microsoft researcher Gordon Bell has been moving the data from his brain onto computers — where he knows it will be safe.
Gordon Bell wearing a SenseCam, which automatically records photos throughout the day.
1 of 2 Sure, you could say all of us do this to some extent. We save digital pictures from family events and keep tons of e-mail.
But Bell, who is 75 years old, takes the idea of digital memory to a sci-fi-esque extreme. He carries around video equipment, cameras and audio recorders to capture his conversations, commutes, trips and experiences. Microsoft is working on a SenseCam that would hang around a person’s neck and automatically capture every detail of life in photo form. Bell has given that a whirl. He also saves everything — from restaurant receipts (he take pictures of them) to correspondence, bills and medical records. He makes PDF files out of every Web page he views.
In sum, this mountain of data — more than 350 gigabytes worth, not including the streaming audio and video — is a replica of Bell’s biological memory. It’s actually better, he says, because, if you back up your data in enough places, this digitized “e-memory” never forgets. It’s like having a multimedia transcript of your life.
By about 2020, he says, our entire life histories will be online and searchable. Location-aware smartphones and inexpensive digital memory storage in the “cloud” of the Internet make the transition possible and inevitable. No one will have to fret about storing the details of their lives in their heads anymore. We’ll have computers for that. And this revolution will “change what it means to be human,” he writes.
Continued on CNN
Gordon Bell’s Total Recall Website
