Bell, 72, works for Microsoft Research Labs, the futurology branch of Bill Gates's empire, and has been recording his life in every possible way for the past seven years.

A reporter for the US business magazine Fast Company (online at fastcompany.com) described meeting him.

"He had a tiny bug-eyed camera around his neck, and a small audio recorder at his elbow. As we chatted, Bell's gear quietly logged every gesture and all my blathering small talk. His computer had carefully archived all the emails I'd sent him, copies of my articles he'd read, pages he'd surfed on my blog.

"When I saw him the next day, in his cramped personal office in San Francisco, he offered to give me a glimpse of the memories he'd collected. Hundreds of pictures of the meeting scrolled by on his screen, and the sound of our day-old conversation filled the room. It was a deeply strange feeling.

"His custom-designed software, MyLifeBits, saves everything it can get its hands on. For every piece of email he sends and receives, every document he types, every chat session he engages in, every Web page he surfs, a copy is scooped up and stashed away.

"MyLifeBits records his telephone calls and archives every picture snapped by that device around his neck. Stacks of documents from his 47-year computer career have been hoovered up and scanned in. The archive begins with photos of Bell's mother's birth, in 1900, and basically never stops, sucking in everything from the sublime to the ridiculous."

It might all sound crazy. But Gordon Bell is just one of a number of experiments in erasing the line between people and the internet. One day, it is proposed, we will be able to download the entire contents of our minds and pool them to make a superbrain. Meanwhile, serious money is going into getting as close as possible to that dream – or nightmare.

Steve Whittaker, from Sheffield University, was one of the speakers at a recent conference at the British Library, The Future of Our Pasts, organised by the state-funded Memories For Life Network, which involves computer scientists, psychologists, neuroscientists, sociologists, and professionals in information organisation, in applying technology to human memory problems and trying to make artificial memory more human.

Whittaker understands unease about the idea that everything about everybody could become data for processing. But we are moving that way too fast to opt out.

In 1956, a gigabyte of computer memory cost $10m dollars. Today it is a dollar. That means it is feasible, for example, to store security camera recordings instead of wiping them after a set period. And scientists are already discussing how they might trawl years of material to go back on the behaviour of criminals and identify giveaway patterns.

"You don't know what you are going to find out until you look," says Whittaker. "It's the same with Gordon Bell and his lifelog. Technologists do these things just to see what happens and make themselves think."

Whittaker has been working on voice-recognition technology which means conversations, interviews, court cases and conferences, can be recorded and back-searched without any need for note-taking or marking up.

And we are moving towards archiving systems for pictures which work similarly – by recognising the images, not the file tags. In short, the keyboard is rapidly becoming an un-necessary barrier between Life and Net.

Down the corridor at the same university, Yorick Wilks has a share of e13m which the EU has spread around seven countries for research into digital "companions".

By the end of the decade, the money should have produced a kind of chat-bot for the elderly which will help them archive their pictures and their memories just by talking – which old people like to do and human carers do not have enough time for.

Another possibility is a lifestyle companion which would quiz us about diet, exercise and medication, and issue advice and reminders. Doctors might prescribe them.

And in the long run, Wilks suggests, we might all want a lifelong companion which learns all about us, filters out our junk mail, organises what we want to keep, offers conversation when we are alone – and, eventually, reminds us what our creaking brains have forgotten.

"People have already shown they can have emotional relationships with stupid bits of plastic like Furbys and Tamagotchis," says Wilks. "How will they feel about ones that can talk?"

There is an argument, of course, that it is not good to file everything. We need to sift, forget, throw away, as we go. Otherwise, as the Fast Company report sums up, "we become like the hapless high-school student who gets 2 million hits for a search on World War 2 and has no way of prioritising them".

In San Francisco, Gordon Bell admits he already has information organisation problems – although sorting those out is the main point of the experiment.

He adds that he finds himself discarding experiences – reading books, for example – which do not contribute to his lifelog. And wouldn't we all be different people if we thought everything we said or did might be on the record?

But the scientists are hooked on the possibilities of inhuman recall. On a mundane level, they argue that our own brains could be more productive if machinery did the small stuff. More grandly, they suggest that total recording could stop the rewriting of history for political motives.

In between those propositions are some simple practical applications. York University is working with Rolls-Royce, for example, on recording the life of an engine.

The professor on that project, Jim Austin, says: "We can all see the point of tracing where an engine has started to develop problems.

"But to do that, we will draw on a lot of the research which sounds funny when applied to human activity. And it is the plummeting price of artificial memory which makes both possible. In short, you can afford to gather the information just to look at it."