We really need to start being more aware of our actions. Why? Today and each day forward will all too soon become our legacy. We are deciding each day who we are. At least who our descendants and others might one day come to believe that we were.
This is concept and info could would fit right into my continuing horror \ sci fi story, "The Unwritten" on Wattpad.
Here's the situation. We are already working on ways to access "big data", massive amounts of information that are essentially useless to a human being. Big data requires computers or a lot of people in order to make it accessible, intelligible, useful.
Without computers, information leaks containing a million pages as in the Edward Snowden situation, or more recently with the eleven million pages from the Panama Papers leak, we simply cannot make use of that much data. It's an ongoing problem the NSA deals with on a daily, even hourly basis.
But we are starting to get a handle on it. Solutions are on the horizon.
We have to assume that in merely a few years, certainly in a few generations down the line, we will have figured something out. Projecting from that we will one day quite easily and literally be able to generate an easily understandable format to receive and manipulate all that data.
The projection that one could make a movie about the life of someone from the past with all that data isn't that far fetched. It could also include far more than we would now consider possible.
It could include for instance, friends you never wanted anyone to know you had. Places you went, things you did you never wanted anyone to know about. To make it "commercially viable" in a sense, that is at least more pleasure able to view, it could even include sexual situations you were in that were never filmed.
Remember, we're talking about the future here.
Regardless of what hidden moments you have stored away, situations meant for no one ever to see, one day they may be able to see it all quite clearly. Just for purposes of speculation, from a short sci fi story of mine, "EarVu", a scientist finds a way to produce 3D videos from previously recorded audio tapes. Think about that for a moment. That technology alone could bring down the entire world.
Already we are talking about taking various random footage shot from ATM machines, people's cell phones, things posted on social media, combing them all and getting 3D representations of what happened in choosing a single element or person as focal point.
This is all rapidly becoming not, science fiction but science fact.
When viewed from the future in using massive data it's entirely possible and would be quite plausible not to mention astounding. What could be discovered about a person's very private life in hindsight?
It is in part after all why conspiracies always fall apart and come out into the light.
Time is enemy to all and friend to some.
How would you feel about one day a movie being made of your life? You would have no control over it, not say in it, and you'd never know about it.
All this from easily known historical data. Though perhaps now being from unknown data. Just information freely available through a future version of some benign entity like Ancestry.com or some other such entity. Like a library.
A film of your life could literally be made by anyone, though more probably it might be made by a descendant of yours. Perhaps simply out of curiosity.
Much as how someone can now write a biography of a historical figure from the past from existing information, photos and such. While now that is mostly limited to those highly documented individuals, many of us are already being highly documented in ways far exceeding that of anyone from the past, or of what we are even now aware of.
Something for us to ruminate over. As some people worry that God can see their most secret actions, what if literally anyone could?
I spent many years studying espionage when I was younger. I discovered from the analysis of freely available data that one can uncover, must as with statistics using available numbers, that you can uncover highly accurate details from information that is freely available.
In taking just a few things from someone's life you can find where they have been in a day on a specific date, even what they were doing. From that you can extrapolate other things. It's really quite amazing and the more you delve into it, the more you can discover.
In taking information from other individuals involved with someone, even peripherally involved in things, you can then find strikingly obvious things about that time. Things that an individual had believed was (and had been right about, except in hindsight) completely private and secret.
Just remember, Time, wears everything down. Entropy rules.
I was stunned during and after college to find what I could do with statistics, with just numbers being correctly manipulated, with reasonable levels of inaccuracy accounted for. I found I could literally foretell the future. I was a media buyer for a while for Tower Records and achieved worldwide top buyer one month for my accuracy. I didn't even have a computer at work back then in the 1980s, I did it all with pen and paper on a clipboard.
However in using computers, machines that can handle massive data, grinding it up into something intelligible, what will we be able to accomplish some day? To see? To know?
Think about it. You can now use a spreadsheet to generate very useful graphs. Even moving graphs. Computer models can generate real life-like looking characters. One day we will be able to produce a film just from big data. Or seemingly happened, might have happened, but that's another (scary) topic.
Time will tell. It surely will.
If ever you wanted to be the star of your own movie, a film about your life, it may just happen. Though it may happen many years after you've passed on.
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