A chuckle on the digital age.

From an emailed editorial I was sent (don't know the original link):

"... Gordon Bell (and fellow Microsoft researcher Jim Gemmell) have written a book called Total Recall, in which they describe the benefits of recording literally everything we do in digital formats, and the process by which we're going down that road. Among the benefits they describe:

• definitive and easily-accessible health records;
• settling who-said-what disputes with your spouse;
• being able to figure out who was at last year's Christmas party; and
• never losing an important written document or photograph.

..."

OK, definitive and easily accessible health records: no one wants those. If "death panels" bothered people, the prospect of the lovely folks at an insurance company telling you, sorry, no, you're not covered for that bypass because we know you ate a Big Mac a week for the past ten years should be a lot worse. (Don't tell me that wouldn't happen. You know it would.) We want plausible deniability.

Settling who-said-what disputes with your spouse by playing back a recording has got to be the single most welcomed idea - by the divorce lawyers association. If that really worked, why wouldn't the spouse play back their own recording and avoid the dispute in the first place?

Christmas parties? If anyone knew you were recording those kinds of details, they wouldn't come to your party, and you wouldn't get invited. Figuring out who was there will be quite easy: not you.

Never losing an important written document or photograph. Yeah, right. Between disk crashes, lost backups, and not knowing where you filed it in those terabytes of indispensable information, good luck.

Why is it that tech mavens seem to have such tenuous contact with the real world?