Increasing intelligence through logging

February 10, 2008

I am an avid chatter. I regularly chat with people via IRC (Internet Relay Chat) and via the instant messaging services such as MSN (Microsoft), AIM (AOL), YIM (Yahoo), ICQ, and GTalk (Google). My current setup is to use the IRC client Irssi, and to access Bitlbee from the IRC client. Bitlbee provides me access to all those instant messaging services.

That means I have one single client program that I use to talk to people across many different services and platforms. But more importantly than that, all logs of the chats are consolidated in one place. This has proven to be a major boon for me. For the longest time, I never really saw the point of logging everything, and I always felt that it was an invasion of privacy when other people did it. However, when I started using Irssi, one day I activated its auto-logging functionality with the command “/set autolog on”. Such a simple command, so I thought I would give it a try.

Soon, I discovered that I no longer needed to write down details or bookmark URLs that came to me via the chats. I could let the logs remember all the details for me. All I needed to remember is roughly who told me or a keyword that would be near the detail of interest. All I have to do is go to the logs and run a search program on them, and that way find information that someone might have told me months or years ago. I’ll even go hunting for phrases and quotes or statements that I think are relevant to a conversation at hand. Sometimes someone will ask a question that I will be able to answer by searching my logs, even though it was part of a conversation that I was not involved with, due to the nature of the IRC channel.

By offloading my memory into a central place, I no longer need to worry about retaining important information that came to me via my chats. It is literally an external memory device for my brain. This is the next step in our evolution, and in fact, a free online science fiction novel Accelerando explores the possibility of external memory devices and search processes.

I think sooner or later we will log all our interactions with the computer, and that will extend our capabilities. How many times have you tried to remember which website you visited but failed to bookmark? There is a variety of information coming to us through multiple programs on the computer. If there was a way to log all of that information, a way to log everything that passes our eyes, then it becomes trivial to relocate that particular bit of information that you saw once a year ago, something that had an impact or gave you an idea. Imagine being able to recover that teeny but influential bit of information quickly and easily instead of being resigned to never finding it again. It would be a tremendous boost to our creativity and intelligence.

Let the logging begin.

Sidenote:
For those that are curious about my choice of Irssi, which is not a graphical irc program, this is due to the fact that I run it in a shell account on another server. I run it inside Screen which lets me connect and detach from the shell without having to close Irssi. That means I can connect to Irssi from any computer with internet access. I like the flexibility of being in a shell account, especially since it means I’m only a few key presses away from searching my logs with Grep, a powerful command line utility for searching.

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