Unnaturally Long Attention Span

AvatarA blog about Grad School at Stanford, Working in a Silicon Valley Internet Company, and Statistical Machine Learning. mike AT ai.stanford.edu

Friendly Big Brother is Watching You

I'm actually a supporter of increased government surveillance.

My friends know that whenever I go to events, I rarely take pictures. I am the un-documentarian. And thus, I have suffered, as my episodic memory is not that great. I think the federal government should improve their tracking and satellite surveillance abilities. That way, I can have great photos and videos of myself wherever I go, 24 x 7, and never have to worry about bringing along a camera. They should also improve their internet traffic monitoring systems to snoop on my network activity, so that I never have to backup my e-mail files again. While they're at it, monitor all my financial transactions so that they can do my taxes for me automatically every year.

If you're reading this blog post, federal government, also consider this: After you've started collecting this huge database you can then create a premium level web service. Allow users to pay an annual subscription fee to log in with their federal credentials. You might even make some money off this and start paying back that deficit. I'd totally use this service as it's much more likely for the U.S. government to be in business in the long term than Flickr or Picassa.

UPDATE: http://io9.com/5191353/what-happens-when-security-cameras-get-involved-with-matchmaking

Jarvis 1

>hi there old friend
Have we met?