Digital Information 250 Years from now some thoughts
Started reading probably one of the best discussion articles on ReadWriteWeb on what digital information might look like 250 years from now. How much data will there be, and what value system will we put around it to determine what is worth keeping and what is not worth keeping. The entry ended up being so long that it my response is worth its own blog entry here.
250 years ago it was 1758, We run head long into Joseph-Marie Jacquard who invented the punch card loom, he was born in 1752, and didn’t invent the idea until much later in his life. But we had the beginnings of computers going back to the abacus, but a mechanical computer being built as early as 1642. There were already glimmers happening for mechanical computers, but it was not until babbage and the difference engine that the idea of a steam powered mechanical computer was actually being funded by the government.
The transistor was discovered and built in 1947, since then we have been working on increasing the density of transistors on chips to build the CPU, while we are running into issues now with heat, quantum effects, and other issues, advanced research in quantum computing, optical computing and other computing methods are already being developed.
250 years from now it will be 2258. We have no idea what digital information will look like, we can make assumptions based on where we are today, the idea of ever increasing smallness, density, power, and processing ability.
The other question is “will we plateau for a while as a society” while we take in the new technologies and make them ours. Our children do this naturally, they take where we are today for granted, it is only in older folks who remember what life was like without the television that bring about generational gaps in computing technology. With the baby boomers expected to die off in the next 40 years, static populations, distribution curves on intelligence, our fascination with religion and the societal norms that society and culture have on technology, we can not define what is to come.
We can take a distopian viewpoint like 1984 or even Robert Heinlines view of the second American revolutionary war, and try to keep ourselves from killing each other off, we can also avoid the “gray goo” issue as well.
Data, value, what is important to the culture at the time, and how future cultures interpret that value is what the question is all about. Will future digital archaeologists be looking at Mr. McScruffy the dog’s stupid video on YouTube, or will they be looking at sexual morays through the viewpoint of PornTube, or the religious and ethical beliefs of society via GodTube? Will a digital archeologist’s be looking at all three of them and coming to conclusions about our society? Are all three equally worthy of “saving for posterity”?
The answer to all of this is that some of the most fascinating articles or books to read are memoirs, of slavery, of life in Victorian England, of life during the middle ages. We are fascinated by how people live, real people. There are 47,963 memoirs on Amazon, there are over 17 million hits on Google for the same word. That is today’s number, meaning that the desire to hold on to data is part of human nature, we will attempt to “store it all”. What we do with that data will most likely be based on research, probability of use, and how cheap it is to store things in both shallow and deep storage.
Ceramic cubes with data stored at the molecular or quantum level, the technology answer to this is a flight of fancy, the human nature part of this is more about what we will do with such data. For everyday life, not much, but as a record of human reactions, viewpoints, music, movies, culture, the information is invaluable. We mourn the loss of the Library of Alexandria when it was burned to the ground, there is no reason to think that we would not feel the same if we torched our digital data with the same wantonness.
Keywords: digital data, future,ideas, readwriteweb, storage, quantum, use, archaeologists, digital, data, thought
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One thing I rarely see mentioned in these far-forward-looking pieces is what technology will exist without electricity. Future generations might look at a data center like the apes staring at the black monolith in Kubrick’s “2001, A Space Odyssey”.
For my money, the pencil is still the biggest innovation known to man. It can be made anywhere, (with minimal training) anyone can use it, and it enables communication between people at great distances. The same might be said of computers, except look how many billions of humans cannot and will not ever see the benefits of computing.