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Your life on one chip - a risk worth taking?
Or 'don't put all your eggs in one basket'...

By silicon.com

Published: Tuesday 20 May 2003

A number of stories doing the rounds recently have highlighted succinctly our over-dependence on technology and the threat it poses us fundamentally-flawed humans.

Consider one example from today's coverage. Hitachi is currently working on a DVD which will store 200 films. Which is fine, until you lose it.

How many people have broken up with somebody they lent a video to and never got it back? How many times have CDs just gone missing?

It's a fairly small scale problem in the grand scheme of things - but you get the idea. At the other end of the scale, however, is the far more serious problem of losing your entire life and identity in one fell swoop.

In an interview with silicon.com to be published later this week Peter Dorrington, head of fraud at private software company SAS Institute, expressed his concerns over biometric ID cards and their allure to organised criminals.

Dorrington says: "The one thing which defines you more than anything else is you identity. This is a person's life - everything is stored on that card. The impact of any problems upon the individual will be terrible."

While advocates of an ID card scheme extol the virtues of one card replacing all the current forms, booklets and cards which an individual must carry around from time to time that very same benefit also becomes its fatal flaw. If that one card is faulty, lost or stolen it will throw the individual into crisis.

Now throw into the mix Microsoft's plans for a virtual brain. The plan: put everything which constitutes your life, livelihood and memories - from important documents to invaluable photographs and videos to important emails and any other kind of electronic data which defines you - onto the one system. A one-stop shop for everything you will ever need to recall and reuse.

But even Microsoft will admit it is far from flawless - the 'blue screen of death' is evidence of that. When your virtual brain crashes it will, at worst, result in a lengthy and complex recovery process and at worst leave the victim with a debilitating case of e-amnesia.

The goal of many technologists and futurologists is a single device which does everything and organises your life entirely. It’s a fine ambition, for its own sake, but is it really a risk we should take?