To The Best Of Our Knowledge; The Quantified Self

It's to the best of our knowledge, today the quantified self. If you haven't heard, there's a new watch out. And according to Tim Cook, it'll change your life. Apple Watch is the most personal device we've ever created. A comprehensive health and fitness device. An Apple Watch gives us the ability to motivate people to be more active and more healthy. Apple Watch helps you live a better day. But does it? I mean, how much do you really want to know about yourself? Because Apple Watch is just the beginning. Call it life -logging, self -tracking, health and fitness monitoring. The market for personal technology is exploding. There are apps and gadgets to track just about every mundane, tiny little thing you do. There are apps that track how much water we drink. There are some devices that will help you to breathe more deeply. There's also the idle alert. It vibrates

when you have been sitting for 20 minutes. It kind of reminds you that you might want to stretch or move your legs. I'm Anne Strange -Shamson. This is Natasha Daushal. For the past few years, she has wandered the aisles at the gigantic annual consumer electronic show in Las Vegas. She's a cultural anthropologist at MIT. And what she's noticing is the emergence of something new, the quantified self, along with some pretty bizarre new inventions. It's called the Pavlov, which is a play on Pavlov, obviously. And it's a wristband linked to your cell phone. It's the same technology as cattle prods. And you can tell it, if I'm browsing too long on Facebook, zap me. The one I read about that really knocked me out is the thing called the happy fork. So the happy fork is an easy one to make fun of. It's a fork that will measure how long you're

chewing for in between bites. And if that duration is less than, I believe, 10 seconds, it will kind of buzz and oscillate in your hand. And the instructions say, if your happy fork starts to vibrate, do not panic. Set it down next to your plate. And when it glows green again, it will be safe to start eating once again. I mean, some people swear by it and they can review retrospectively at the end of the week. They're chewing and meal habits. So this is a way to outsource willpower, seems like. I mean, instead of setting a goal, you know, reducing your calorie intake or spending less time on Facebook, you have a gadget that basically prods you into keeping to your resolutions. Yeah, I think outsourcing willpower is a great way to see it. And I do remember even reading a quote in a piece that was done, I believe, in Forbes about this technology. And the designer in

question said, you know, why do we need to waste our willpower on all of these tiny, tedious, obvious little things? Let's free up our willpower bandwidth for bigger, more consequential decisions and let this technology help regulate us in all these little pesky ways. Well, so I'll be the first to admit that I'm not a person who tracks things. But even if I did, this seems like information overload. I mean, I read that you talked with someone from one of these companies who said that her product gathers about 5 ,000 data points a minute off of the body. What do you even do with all of that? What's it for? Well, it's interesting you say that because the latest thinking is that rather than showing people numbers all the time, you only get in touch with them about it when there's something important. A great example of this would be the new wave of weighing scales. So to us, it makes sense that you get on a scale so that you can see

your number. But these new scales aren't going to show numbers. That's a relief. They may just have little voices that say, have a nice day. And what that means is, nothing to waste your cognitive bandwidth on or your willpower. Go about your day. Everything's fine. I will only bother you if there's a significant error signal in your weight that you should know about. So there's a new wave of products that just kind of run in the background. Maybe you sign on to them. You might set up the initial parameters. How much it'll ask little questions. How much do you want to know when do you want to know it? And then you just let it run and go about your life, trusting that it will be collecting this continuous data. And it will tell you if there's something important for you to know. So you spent some time with members of the quantified self. Movement, tell me about them. So

members of the quantified self movement tend to be more of the kind of techno libertarian geeky sort. A lot of men, a lot of engineers. It's a very DIY kind of community where you give show and tells that are 15 minutes and you need to say, what did you track? How did you track it? What did you learn? And you share that with the community. What do people track? They track everything from the quality and number of their orgasms to their water intake. Their sleep, their moods. And typically what they're trying to do, and this is something that the apple watch is also trying to do, is find patterns, detect patterns and draw correlations across two or more data streams. So the idea isn't simply to know how much water or the number of your orgasms and things like that, but how might those relate to the quality of your sleep, your caffeine intake, some algorithms have even

been written to analyze the semantic content of your email exchanges, or who are you talking to? And it could be that your mood dips at a certain time of the day, because that's likely when you get a call from your mother, something like this. The idea is that there's this kind of detective -like quality in quantified self where you're trying to hunt down these clues to things that are not obvious to you by using big data analytics and these gadgets. You know, that's really kind of fascinating. I mean, it's the kind of thing that people used to go to therapists for, right? To tease out your subconscious motivations and what's really going on in your life and what kind of self -talk are you engaging in and how does that affect your mood? And now it seems like we're doing it with algorithms and data. As an anthropologist, I think there's more to the difference there, because the kind of person that something like a therapeutic or psychoanalytic approach assumes is a person who's psyche you can excavate. It's there to be

uncovered and revealed. And this kind of self that is at stake in continuous tracking and big data analysis is quite different. One of the self -trackers I spoke with said, I think of myself as a time series self, where the self unfolds in many little bits over time and you sort of check in when a sufficient amount of time and data has built up to see what clues might be revealed there. So I have to say one of the things that I really value about life is its messiness. I like it that people are chaotic and not rational. I mean that's part of why we have literature, right? Because we have life stories that are rich and complex. Something about the sense of self you're describing and the kind of tracking seems, you know, seems like it's all about control. I think quantification, this sort of numerical imagination is related in interesting ways to messiness and playfulness. It doesn't have to be this completely top -down control

that sucks the life out of everything. I think it's too easy to dismiss this stuff on those grounds. I had my graduate students take a class I called self as data and in that class we tried to compare contemporary apps and tracking gadgets with historical precursors and one really interesting one was Sanctorious in 1700s. He developed a special what he called the weighing chair and he would sit in it as he ate every meal and it would weigh the sort of in -sensate perspiration he called it. So it was very accurate and as he ate the chair would actually lower down, you know, it was basically an algorithm that dictated when he had had enough the chair was too low for him to reach the table. So it's not that different in the way that it was imagined and the way that it functioned from many of the caloric intake weight loss apps that you'll find today

on iPhones. And I suppose the point you're making is that long before digital technology existed we were doing this. I mean think about diary keepers like Ben Franklin who kept track of just literally everything. Right and Ben Franklin wasn't simply a diary writer because he had a special ivory tablet with these 13 columns for these 13 virtues as he called them which are very related to the kind of virtues if we want to use that language that a lot of this tracking is about today. It was has he been gluttonous, did he get to sleep on time, other things like this and he would actually have tick off the little boxes every day and then erase it and start again. So many people point to Franklin as one of the first American trackers. I guess sounds like what you're saying is that the technology may have changed but the underlying attitude has been the same for hundreds of years and the underlying attitude being self -improvement or even to be a sort of ethical aesthetic project

of what is it to lead a good life. What this is a long -standing question of how actually to be a better human and lead a good life. I'm not sure that the attitude has remained the same across history and I'm not sure that the digital doesn't change it in some way when it comes on the scene. For instance, just as one example, I do think that nowadays it's also about a lot of anxiety. How exactly do I manage myself? There's competing expertise out there in the news telling you what to eat, when to sleep. There is already information overload there and I think people are desperate for something to guide them and track them and share the burden of self -regulation itself improvement but it's also submission. There's a significant degree of submission over to technology and big data analytics. That's interesting because you're talking about anxiety

and I was thinking going back to where we began talking about apps and gadgets that monitor essentially stuff around health and fitness and I was thinking, yeah, health used to be something you had until you lost it. But with all of these gadgets, it seems like the assumption is that health is something so precarious that you have to constantly be monitoring it. Yeah, I think this technology accords with a present in which the real health demons are not acute bacterial infections that are sort of invisible and then suddenly they're there and you treat them but lifestyle diseases. Diseases where you have a choice as I've heard it talked about. Diabetes, back pain, all of these things that creep up on you in tiny little bits and I think it's precisely these lifestyle diseases of modern life that offer themselves as trackable to digital technology. No wonder we're terrified.

If the message we're getting is that all those tiny little incremental choices we make every day, whether to take the stairs or not, those things are going to kill us. Of course we're anxious. We're also anxious because we are living in a consumer society and we are exhorted at every turn in the mall or on the street or on our phones as we're riding the bus to consume those, to consume that, eat this, drink this. It is a sort of bombardment and I learned a while back about a technology you can load this app onto your iPhone or your smartphone and go into a supermarket and hold it out up to the labels, scan them and it will tell whether this food is safe or where it falls on the sort of yellow to red to green scale. And it's almost like these are little shields. This is this land, this dangerous landscape of temptation inside the supermarket and when we've been reduced to arming ourselves with these little

apps to protect ourselves both from the array of products and also from our own desires. Natasha Daushul is a cultural anthropologist at MIT. She's got a book on self -tracking due out next year. It's called Keeping Track. And one of the more prominent members of the quantified self -community is a guy named Nicholas Felton. He's a former Facebook designer and he's also an obsessive self -tracker and for him the issue isn't how much data you can collect about yourself. It's what to do with it. And because he's a designer he makes his personal data beautiful. He calls his data sets his annual reports and some of them are actually in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. Sarah next talked with him. What's the first thing you tracked about yourself? The first thing that got me hooked on investigating my own habits was a website called Last FM and this allowed me to connect all the

songs that I played in iTunes to a website. This was this whole really interesting area of my life in which I had almost complete transparency into my habits and that kind of led me on this quest of wanting to have that perspective on other aspects of my life. It might be a quirk of my personality but I think that there's this interesting rift between the way that we describe ourselves, our own like unquantified self -image, our qualitative view of ourselves, and what's quantified. So it's nice to me when these things link up but it's also nice to discover biases in your behavior that you didn't really understand. It's like being your own anthropologist or something. Yeah, just hitting record on your life and then seeing what comes out of it. We should explain what the annual reports are. Can you just explain how they work and when you started doing them? Sure. So the annual report is a project that I undertake every single year and I've been doing it for about nine years now. The

report takes the form of me tracking some set of behaviors over the course of the year and then in January sitting down and trying to create data visualizations and quantifications of the activities that I undertook over the course of the year. I'm trying to create as complete a record of my life as I can in the 16 pages of this printed book that I produce at the end of the year. What's the value of the kind of over the course of the year view for you? So I think a lot of the products that people use that quantify their life, they're focused on optimization and optimization of all aspects of my life is not an explicit goal. So I'm merely driven by this curiosity about whether you can quantify different behaviors and whether there's something useful at the end of that data stream. So is there an interesting story or a curious factoid or

a pattern that sort of lays bare your behavior in one single graph? Well, I'm really kind of fascinated to hear that you didn't just assume that there would be value in looking at the year as a whole like that you went in looking to see whether there would be value in the experiment. I mean, I assume that you put all that energy in because you believed utterly that it would be valuable. Yeah, I don't know if that enough people have worked with this data to actually know what the value is and over the course of this project it's been fun to work with quantifying things that I don't think have been very deeply explored yet and to see if there is any value with it. I want to make it really clear to everybody who's listening that the visual representations you make are often really beautiful. They're very elaborate, they're kind of compelling. They look a little mysterious like you want to spend some time with them to get to the bottom of what's actually happening in the visualizations and I guess what I'm trying to get at is are there ways in which the visualizations in all their beauty and depth can actually be misleading? You know, it's that like lies, damn lies statistics and now it's like visualized statistics even worse,

more seductive. Yeah, I mean when you look at my reports it is it's an act of exploration for myself. So I'm trying to find something that resonates for me and you know my editorial process in making these is not to mislead people about my behavior. I don't want to share my most intimate secrets in these reports but I'm hoping that there is some sort of pattern that appears that is unique to me and is not there simply for the sake of being seductive. You have worked with at least one other person's data, right? Your dad's. Can you tell me about that project? Certainly. My dad was born in 1929 in Berlin and he lived a long and full life before I was ever born and he had an incredible set of travel stories and my sister and I for years really wanted him to write down his life story for us to pass on to our family and we spent some time videotaping him talking about it but ultimately he slipped through our fingers and he

passed away and I didn't feel like I had a great grasp of how his life had progressed and as my sister and I were going through the momentos he left behind I started setting aside these piles of data rich personal belongings like his passports and his letters receipts that he'd kept and at a certain point I realized that his personal history was stored in all these these momentos and I asked my sister if she'd be all right with me parsing it and trying to figure out if I could rebuild his life story from these momentos and she gave me her blessing so I think it took about two months to go through everything and ultimately I was able to step through his life sort of decade by decade matching up like an old photo from a passport with this quantified view of like what his early years in Berlin were like all the way through to living like the 50s and 60s in Canada and coming to the Bay Area in the in the 70s and then my sister and I showing up

and how this impacted his life and do you feel like you knew him better at the end of all of that? I did it was a very therapeutic process of just being you know sort of meditating over his stuff and learning these things about his life ultimately like we had a memorial for him and I had these printed reports and it was amazing to me that I was able to hand it to his 70 and 80 -year -old friends and they immediately got it and you know could identify themself in the apartments he lived in or the museums that he'd gone to or the restaurants that he liked and so that was very heartwarming for me and I think it was almost like this you know literal scattering of his ashes being able to send these reports to people who collect them like in Europe and in South America and so I liked the idea that he's living on and all these people's libraries around the world. You know after I took a moment and sat back and took a deep breath after going through some of the

reports I started to think about how mystics and scientists and philosophers as well have over the centuries asked what life is and I wondered particularly with your dad's project and maybe with the culmination of all of your projects what you're trying to do is figure out what life is can it be quantified? Yeah I mean if I get mystic about it I do have this I don't know almost like philosophers go in mind that perhaps if I collect just the right data and represent it in just the right way it all makes sense. Nicholas Felton's personal data visualizations are in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art and he's also designed an app to help other people obsessively document their lives it's called reporter Sarah next talk to them. I'm Anne Strange -Champson coming up we'll meet a genius computer scientist with the largest

personal data set in the world. It's to the best of our knowledge from Wisconsin Public Radio and PRI, Public Radio International. One of the big questions in the quantified self movement is what to do with all your data. You know like let's say you've tracked all the websites you've visited for the past year or every dessert you've eaten. Now what do you do with it? You can make it visual with charts and graphs and maps but our producer for this hour Craig Eley is also interested in another way to represent data sonically plus he's a bit of a life logger himself. Just a little bit. Although I do use Nicholas Felton's reporter app. I knew. So how do you turn your personal data into sound though? Well I don't do it myself that's the first thing. Last year I was working at Penn State and I had a chance to meet this guy Matt Kenney. He was a graduate student there

and he does this project that he calls data sonifications. The basic idea is that instead of plotting data on two dimensions like you mentioned in a graph you take data points and you map them to sonic elements that you have frequency and volume things that can change over time. So what does that sound like? Well you'll find out. I called Matt and gave him some of my own data. I asked him to work with it. This is a process that can sometimes take him months. I asked him to do it in a few days so it was a big favor. But we got to talking and I also asked him a lot about his work and whether or not he thinks it's a kind of music. So that's a question that's really up for debate. I consider it music or a type of musicality. If you think about a composer like Brian Eno let's say who uses algorithms to compose his music or Janis Zinnakis as another one who used algorithms and chance to kind of compose his pieces. I think data sonification might fall in that vein. So really we're just using the data as a way to drive composition.

On the other side it can also really be used as a scientific tool or a way to gather information and bring a new understanding to the data that you couldn't say in a couple of line graphs or in a bar chart. So Matt a few days ago I gave you a data set that tracks basically all the time I've spent on my computer for the first hundred days of this year and that's broken down into categories. So walk me through this once you get that big old spreadsheet filled with numbers. What does your process look like? So the first step is kind of cleaning the data. So I'll go through and make sure everything is cleaned up fill in any gaps and then I go and read it into a program called Super Collider which is a computer programming language and then do just some general mapping. So I'll take each data point, each variable and map it to a different instrument and then start designing the instruments and let it go from there. So what does the sound of me surfing the internet on my computer sound like?

So in thinking about this data set I mean computers are remarkably quiet, right? So it felt like I had a little bit of wiggle room to like really play around with these sounds. For instance one of the categories was communication and scheduling and I just kind of designed a sound around the Gmail sound that you might hear on your phone the kind of like getting a Gmail and then mapping that to the data set. That's fantastic. I mean I spend a ton of time in my email. I mean it work for business stuff. I mean I'm guessing that's probably one of the more prominent sounds that you had to work with. Yeah absolutely. Yeah you actually spent a lot of time, spent a lot of time in communication and scheduling. So I think that'll be a pretty prominent sound when you listen to the soundification. So talk about another sound. Yeah so news was another category. So how much time you spent on different news sites? And I enjoy reading the news from time to time but generally I find it kind of annoying and a little depressing. So I thought maybe a saw wave maybe like a buzzing sound like a going in

your ear. So as the time that you spent surfing these news sites goes up you'll hear the frequency of that saw wave go up. So tell me about the time I spent data logging. What does that sound like? So I don't know. Thinking about a sound for data logging itself. Yeah so maybe it's just like maybe it's like a ticking sound. Maybe it's just like a maybe like checking out checking a box off like a tick. Okay so when you put it all together what does all my data sound like? I know that you've worked with really big historical data. I mean obviously I think the spreadsheet I gave you is is some of the most important data you've ever worked at. But I understand that you've actually used this you know you've done work with this really massive data set that had to do

with Antarctic ice melt. Yeah so I worked with a polar center at Penn State a group of really great scientists that collected this data and projected a little bit back into the past and then into the future to get these 400 ,000 years of Antarctic ice melt. In designing that we really stuck to kind of more representational sounds. So again maybe for solar radiation you can kind of like hear like this like tingling sound like maybe sun hitting the ice or for the ice melting you could hear it was like kind of like a rattling of like ice cubes in the glass. Yeah sure. And then as far as the soundification is concerned I think what soundification brings to the table is being able to digest multiple layers simultaneously. So if you think about nine line graphs those are they're probably hard to all take in at the same time. But if you can listen to them it really like brings a another level to the understanding of the data. Producer and life logger Craig E. Late talking with Matt Kenney. Matt's hacker

researcher and artist who's getting his MFA in new media at Penn State University. When Stephen Wolfram was just 17 he dropped out of college. By the time he was 21 he had a PhD in physics and he was one of the first recipients of a MacArthur Genius Award. On today he designs widely used software for mathematicians and scientists but he is also an obsessive self -tracker with what is likely the largest personal data set in the world. Steve Paulson asked him about it. Lots of people are keeping life logs these days but you have been accumulating a massive data set about yourself for decades. Can you take me back to the 1980s and why you started doing this? Oh it's just it's easy to collect data and I've been interested in data and so I just started collecting it. And each different type of data I had a different reason to once a collect. Like I collect my keystroke logs of every key that I type on a computer because one day I lost some stuff that I was doing on a computer when the computer crashed and I figured let's not do that again. That's just record

everything that I type and that way I can always reconstruct what I did. But then I've managed to keep the systems running well enough that I now have kind of 25 years of data about lots of kinds of things about myself. So give me just a brief rundown as some of the different kinds of things you're collecting right now. Oh gosh let's see. Well I mean right now I just like three or four months ago I started collecting continuous heart rate data because it got easy enough to just wear a watch that collects heart rate data and you know skin temperature and all kinds of other things like that. I don't yet know what that stuff means. I probably could figure out whether I'm having a good time or not on this interview so far by looking at all of that but I don't yet know how to interpret it. Okay where else are you collecting? Let's see on my computer screen I capture an image of the screen every 15 seconds or so so I can get kind of a time lapse video of what I do all day which is actually dreadfully it's it's shockingly boring to watch. Then I guess I get everything to do with email you know all my

meeting calendar stuff correlated with email. I guess I just I happen to go on some trip to the opposite side of the earth a couple of weeks ago with a couple of my kids and I was sort of interested in the jet lag problem and so I said okay I'll try and collect in detail data about myself and the jet lag that I did didn't have you know I've been collecting for ages when when I go to sleep when I have to when do I wake up but a little bit more data around that and hopefully from that it'll be possible to understand given also some of the external data that we have about you know when did the sun come up how bright was it that day be able to figure out something interesting about what causes or ameliorates jet lag and so on. So you're collecting just massive amounts of data about yourself and about your surroundings and I assume you you analyze this data in some way what would have you learned about yourself. Look I wouldn't collect this data if it wasn't easy to do these systems they just sit they collect the data if I have to think hard about them it isn't going to happen. I suppose when I first started looking at this data maybe 15 years ago or so now

and I learnt a few things about sort of the way that was most efficient for me to work to process email every day and so on. I also learnt things about trying to figure out when when do I have new ideas about things you know when I'm designing software and so on there comes a moment when I've invented some term for something and I can go back and look when did I first use that term how does it grow from there. I mean I could imagine that that one point of this would just be you want to learn about yourself you want you want to kind of get a picture of who you are and then another reason would be you want to sort of change your behavior I mean you want to do things more efficiently better somehow because of what you what you learn. Yes you know I think the best thing for that is that I get feedback every day about sort of what I did the last day you know how many keystrokes that I type how many steps did I walk those kinds of things and I do get a pretty decent sense of oh what things really you know send me into unproductivity and what don't. So the more keystrokes the more productive than. Typically yes so I've tried to organize my life so I don't do too many

things where I have to put work in but it isn't productive. When there are keystrokes something is being created that's usually the the principle for me at least I'm happy to say. This is fascinating I mean basically you're saying you can you can look at your behavioral patterns and you can figure out when you are most creative when you come up with your best ideas and presumably you can kind of organize your behavior to maximize those peak moments. Yeah yeah what's been important to me is when the data is easy enough to sort of analyze and I've built quite a few tools to analyze this data then when you have a specific question it actually makes sense to go analyze that question like you know I get a new computer keyboard I ask is it fast or slower to type on my new computer keyboard well if that was going to take me more than five minutes to answer I probably wouldn't bother if I have tools set up so that it only takes me five minutes to answer that I'm going to end up with my better keyboard that's you know three percent faster to type on or something the main thing that I've learnt is first of all it's like collect all the data

don't put too much effort into collecting the data because you've put a lot of effort you know you'll stop doing it after a while then the other thing is you've got to have tools to analyze things that are efficient enough that when you have a question about yourself for example you can actually go and with reasonably modest effort get some answer to that question one of the things I'd like to be able to do is you know how much of my responding to email could I replace with a bot one of the things that I sort of just started getting into is the question of given all the data that I have on what I end up doing how much of the what I end up doing is actually completely predictable in other words to what extent can I essentially have an algorithm that just does what I would do so to speak which would be nice because then I can do something different well by now you must have one of the largest personal data sets ever collected I'm guessing I think I probably do yeah you know it was funny because a couple of years ago I wrote some stuff about this and I kind of expected that people would come out and say

oh you know you think you've collected a lot of data but that's nothing compared to what I've got but nobody nobody you know people said well I've got a small fraction of what you've got and I have to say I found it kind of shocking because I you know one would think the person who's collected the most data in the world must be the nerdiest person out there and I that's up myself and it's fascinating to hear all this stuff that you do and the picture that I'm getting is that you're just fascinated by this stuff partly it's things that you can do with this information part of it is just this is your way of understanding the world and also more specifically understanding yourself who you are I don't know it's it's one facet of that at least it's kind of interesting it gives one a certain reality to one's impressions of one's self -form and can actually see this this plot that shows yes I you know my impression is that I do this but look here's an actual curve and I can tell from this curve that really is what I do and sometimes one sees things where it's like I didn't realize this is a you know a gradual thing that's changing over

over course of years but one can see it in the data and when one thinks about it yes that's really what's happening it's it's kind of like can you get an automated historian that can pull out sort of interesting things interesting kind of themes about what's going on so let let me tell you one scenario that I can imagine in terms of how this data can be used to to affect what we do in in daily life I mean just as we subscribe to online music services that find new songs that match our tastes we're going to have apps I'm sure we already do to some degree that tell us what books to read what films to see what restaurants to eat at you know all based on our likes and dislikes which politicians devote for I mean basically we will become perfect consumers in all walks of life do you see this is our future well I think the real question is is the future of people to follow what the auto -suggest systems of their computers tell them to do I mean in other words right now you go driving somewhere you'll typically follow what your GPS tells you to do you'll look for recommendations for things you'll you'll often follow what the recommendations say one of the questions is

at what points do those recommendations get to be better than what any human can reasonably figure out about what one should do and I think the answer is that that will definitely happen I mean it's it's very easy for our computer systems to have much more information about our history how we've responded to different things in the past and so on then we can readily think through that with our brains but if we if we really do outsource all these choices to our machines to algorithms have we lost free will at that point well I think that's the interesting thing that you know we have an artificial intelligence I've spent lots of time building components of what's needed to make sort of a complete artificial intelligence so to speak but even if you have one of these things it does not intrinsically have goals about what it's trying to do you know you can have this incredibly smart box sitting on your desk you know you can ask questions and it can respond with sort of the wisdom the best wisdom that can be achieved so to speak but with intelligence doesn't come goals goals are a

sort of separate thing and goals that humans have tend to be things that come from sort of the long history of culture and civilization and individual histories of individual humans and so on unless one's AI has essentially the exact same experiences that the human has and has exact same constraints that the human has there's no intrinsic sense of having goals in the ways that humans have them you know my view of of where we're going with technology and automation and so on is and it's really just a continuation of what's happened for a long time the humans define the goals the machines do the best they can to achieve those goals as efficiently as possible and the goals that we can define are becoming more and more sophisticated but still just left to its own devices the machine doesn't know what to do now it seems like one of your big projects I mean to look at various aspects of of your company for instance is to democratize knowledge by making data by making powerful computational technologies accessible pretty

much to everyone is that a fair thing to say oh yeah oh yeah that's an exciting thing that one can take what has been kind of knowledge and computation that's accessible only to experts and make it possible for anyone anywhere to be able to do that I mean it's kind of been a goal that I've had since I was a kid actually to see whether one could take sort of the knowledge that's been accumulated in our civilization and make it so that if there are questions that can in principle be answered on the basis of that knowledge it becomes automatic and efficient to do that you know I wasn't sure in which decade one could actually build a practical system that would make that possible turned out it was well pretty much this decade it's been great to be around at a time when sort of that transition is happening and to be able to to make a system that does that Stephen Wolfram is a computer scientist and the CEO of Wolfram Research Steve Falson talked with him now you'd be thinking that you have nothing in common with all these self -trackers but let me ask you this

have you ever kept a diary writer Sarah Mangusso has for 25 years and coming up we'll talk about what she's learned I'm Ann Strain Champs it's to the best of our knowledge from Wisconsin Public Radio and PRI Public Radio International we've been talking about the current obsession with digital life logging but you don't necessarily need fancy technology to pay obsessive attention to the details of your life and people have been keeping diaries and journals for centuries writer Sarah Mangusso keeps a daily diary and she has complicated feelings about it her new book on goingness is a short meditation on journal writing and also about how becoming a new mother changed her feelings about living her life on a page Steve Falson asked her to read a passage from the beginning I started keeping a diary

25 years ago it's 800 ,000 words long I didn't want to lose anything that was my main problem I couldn't face the end of a day without a record of everything that had ever happened I wrote about myself so I wouldn't become paralyzed by rumination so I could stop thinking about what had happened and be done with it more than that I wrote so I could say I was truly paying attention experience in itself wasn't enough the diary was my defense against waking up at the end of my life and realizing I'd missed it imagining life without the diary even one week without it spurred a panic that I might as well be dead Sarah it seems like you set up an almost impossible task for yourself as if your diary could be a record of your entire life that's that kind of what you're trying to do that is exactly what I was trying to do yes and I did understand very basic terms that

it's essentially impossible to keep a record of every moment of one's life all the sensory information and all of the words that were spoken and all of the things that I thought but I still had this anxiety that I had to maintain the diary anyway I had to at least try it it felt as I say in the book is necessary to my hygiene as as bathing so this gives you pleasure it sounds like to write in your diary every day pleasure and also very much a kind of relief do you say that keeping this diary became an absolute compulsion and that became a problem I mean you call it a vice I call it a vice in order to kind of counteract the immediate response of people say oh that's so virtuous I attempt to do that every January I make a New Year's resolution or I don't have the discipline and really the practice of keeping my diary was something utterly outside

willpower or discipline in fact it would have taken willpower and discipline not to keep it that's why I call it a vice in the book in my 20s I stopped to write every time I happened upon beauty it was an old fashioned project romances were examined in detail each one was new my 30s were filled not by romance but by other writing virtuous activities such as exercise and housekeeping also were logged the rapsities of the previous decade thinned out toward the end of my 30s and into my 40s entries became further abbreviated most of the sentences started with verbs I is omitted from as many sentences as possible occurring only for emphasis I logged work and health symptoms medications side effects housekeeping was no longer noted if I read or looked at or heard something extraordinary I named it but as one ages fewer things fall into this category reflection disappeared

almost completely and my sense is that the biggest change came once you became pregnant and your son was born why did that have such a big impact on on what you did in your diary well I was prepared for all the cliches of parenthood the exhaustion simply just not having enough time but those things weren't what ultimately arrested my obsessive daily maintenance of the diary what arrested it was that I started inhabiting time in a new way I realized that I was simultaneously forgetting more than I'd ever thought I could bear and I was also remembering more than I'd ever thought I could well it sounds like you're saying that the experience of pregnancy and motherhood changed the way you thought about memory about time itself and about writing yes all of those things changed the other strange thing that happened to my memory very soon after I gave birth to my son is that these very old pre -verbal memories started to surface and

I had always been such a doubter whenever anybody would say oh I have this very early memory of going hiking in the rainforest with my father when I was four months old I can remember the way the trees looked or I remember what it was like to be in my playpen or my crib and I just thought oh you know you've seen a photograph this has all been projected onto you listen to people describing these events I just I just didn't believe it I didn't have any pre -verbal memories of my own and so it seemed impossible but I had so many experiences of being with this pre -verbal creature my tiny son and as I was feeding him with a spoon one day if you've ever fed a baby with a spoon you know it's very messy right it's not quite as simple as just delivering the food via the spoon into the baby's mouth I mean you you attempt that some of the food you know reaches its goal and then much of the rest of it sort of dribbles

down the baby's chin and jaw and one of the first times I ever did that I suddenly had this incredibly vivid sense memory of someone doing that to me of feeling the spoon scraping my chin and of tasting that already tasted food and feeling oh you know this this dribbled food this pre -tasted food doesn't taste as good as the food that that got in during the first attempt at feeding me it really felt as though my memory were trying to help me understand what it was like to be my son it was like this emergency empathy do you think you were actually remembering something that happened to you maybe maybe you were a year old or or even less I really do think that because the most vivid of these early memories was a memory of being in my crib and the collection of sense memories around this was just so vivid and they were so extensive there was this panel on my crib that was orange and it had a lot of little things that I could

twiddle with there was a crank that I could turn there was a bell that I could ring the bell was silver I know what the screw looked like there was a mirror it was in the bottom left hand corner I can see it I can hear it I can feel it in my hand and I know I've never seen a photograph of it well it seems that there's kind of a profound philosophical question here I mean if our sense of self is basically built on our memories what happens if our memories change I mean does our sense of self change that's I don't know I don't know whether my sense of self change but certainly my beliefs about the role of memory and certainly about the roles of enforced memory through keeping it diary were changed utterly by this experience I've been basically the same person since I had my son I know this isn't true for all new mothers especially those who are younger than I am and most of them are but I feel like a

monolith now I've emerged from a gauntlet and it has something to do with having become a mother and it has something to do with having become qualitatively old and it has something to do with having run out of time and life to perceive and ruminate and record my minutes and days in the diary what I'm saying is that I have become in a way in your to the passage of time I'm not really paying attention to what's happening to me anymore no longer observing steadfastly the things that have changed since yesterday now one of the central tensions in your book is whether writing this diary got in the way of living I mean I've actually experiencing the world rather than kind of always observing it from a distance have you sorted this out well I think I think the tension between the need to record and the need to do anything but record is less terrifying to me now than it once was there's a sort of bitter

sweet anecdote in the book about declining a ride from New York to Boston with a friend who would only live a few more years but you know of course not knowing that at the time I said no you know I'm going to take the Greyhound so I can just sit and write in this little book for four hours because the need for me to do that is greater than the need for me to be with my friend I'm less likely to make that choice now Sarah Manguzzo's book is called ongoingness the end of a diary she talked with Steve Paulson to the best of our knowledge comes to you from Madison Wisconsin and the studios of Wisconsin Public Radio this hour was produced by our Public Humanities scholar Craig Ely he's with us thanks to a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies and Craig also tracked a bit of this hour

and created a website for it full of cool data visualizations about a bunch of other stuff you can find it at ttbook .org backslash qs today's show was also produced by Raymond Tungicar Charles Monroe Kane Doug Gordon and Sarah Nicks our theme music comes from Steve Mollum from walk west music. Carole Owen is our technical director Steve Paulson is our executive producer and I'm Anne Strange -Champs thanks for listening.