8 Reader Responses

1. speedbird Says:
   March 31st, 2008 at 7:13 am

   I had a conversation a few weeks ago on this sort of topic which I can’t shake off. I commented to a guy at work how it was funny that people who take digital pictures never delete the crap ones, even though this is supposed to be one of the advantages of the digital medium.

   ‘Isn’t it great!?’ he exclaimed. ‘What it means is, in fifty years time, everything’ll still be here, as good as new.’

   ‘Yeah, but you’ll never be able to read it,’ I said. ‘Everything will be incompatible in a few years’ time. You know how hard it is to read an old floppy or Word from an old version.’

   ‘Nah,’ he disagreed, ‘It’s Microsoft forever now.’

   ‘Forever?’

   ‘Well, for the next thousand years.’

   This little exchange has given me much food for thought. Putting aside the thousand-year Reich of Microsoft for a moment, and how likely or otherwise that might be in the light of known history, there’s issues here about how hard it is to find anything relevant if you keep everything, and about the sources of people’s perceptions of different types of media. Maybe the world does indeed need a few performance-librarians…

2. Ian Says:
   March 31st, 2008 at 12:14 pm

   If people start keeping everything, not only will it become more difficult to find what you need, but people will miss a lot of actual experience. They’ll be too busy trying to capture it correctly. If everything is still going to be there, brand new, in 50 years, why bother paying much attention to it now?

   I think as we become aware of how much information we can capture, we will also become aware of how much is streaming past us at all time. The more we try to save, the more we will realize we are losing.

   I can see a few possible futures based on this:

   1) As more captured data becomes available, we will have to sort it according to personal subjective relevance, what is most meaningful to us at the time (whether as individuals or groups), which is what I think Google and web 2.0 are trying to do, to a certain extent. We’ll also need to be able to reference this data back to some point in our real life. In this sense, if there is some kind of societal crash (major or minor) coming up, those who are forced to re-engage life for survival might be the lucky ones. They may become sources of data relevant to keeping up with the difficult changes of everyday life (assuming, of course, they still had access to an internet of some sort). Maybe it will be a return to small local community intranets, similar to the military intranets that started the internet.

   Or…

   2) As more captured data becomes available, we become better and better at storing it, leaving it to future generations to sort it out (kind of like we do with our physical waste). This data waste would end up in giant archives to someday maybe mean something to someone else. In a positive sense, these data archives could be something similar to the role the monasteries were supposed to have played during the dark ages, maintaining the important ideas and experiences of the previous culture through its collapse, to be re-used in a future renaissance. In a negative sense though, we could end up with a bunch of computers storing memories that no one ever accessed, giant brains without any emotions to figure out what to do with all the info.

   Also, as speedbird points out, backwards compatibility might become a problem, but I don’t see this being likely. If we always have to update our data archives to fit new programs/systems/forms-of-communication, we’ll feel less and less secure in actually capturing that data in the first place. As data storage and maintenance becomes more important, people will lose faith in companies that don’t allow for the importance of backward compatibility. Once a company made backwards compatibility a priority over any sort of planned obsolescence of data, they could quickly become a market leader, just because of the time this would save their customer.

   This (or something like it) makes me think that we won’t have to worry about things going to the way of the floppy disk any time soon. Floppy discs date back to the early days of computing, when people thought a Quick-and-Dirty-Operating-System would be soon replaced by something much better. I think we have learned much about the importance of maintaining data usability since then.

3. Big Elk Says:
   March 31st, 2008 at 6:40 pm

   I think the increase in data storage will simply force better and better systems of software & organization, which will ultimately lead to an AI on the scale of what science-fictionists refer to, perhaps, as a “God-like intelligence”.

   You’re also going to see storage of personalities digitally, which will push the limits of what a human is and what human rights are (along with corporate law and the definition of a juristic person).

   Cool conversation, even if it doesn’t quite drive at the practical details of futuristic data interaction points and how to engineer them for free-form free-floating & immersive displays.

4. Ian Says:
   March 31st, 2008 at 8:05 pm

   But wouldn’t an AI with God-like intelligence require some sort of central server (a “seat” if you will)? I think that would require to much centrality (and therefore controlability) to be really workable.

   Combining the idea of an AI intelligence with the digital storage of personality (by which I think you mean more creating a digital cache of what is and what represents our personality, rather than actually downloading conciseness ala the Matrix, but correct me if I’m wrong!), I can see something akin to Pokemon, or more properly the daemons of Phillip Pullman’s Golden Compass series. Granted, those are oversimplifications of what I mean, but it would something that is both a representation of us and also a sort of helper monkey that help sort and find data for us (think the dog in the old Lycos commercials, the search dog in windows, or the paper clip in office).

   I’ve long thought of the internet as sort of the proto-collective unconscious made physical (ie: external to our brains), in that it contains a lot of information that we need and use but which we can’t keep in our heads at once. If it grows enough, it could become, like the unconscious, something that we needed “helper spirits” or “familiars” to navigate.

   These AI programs would become digital avatars in a true sense, a sort of mask or sub-personality that represented us and our interests in the digital realm. I’m not sure if I mean computer programs on handheld devices, programs in an actual Matrix type environment, or something else entirely. Just that it would be something that is a part of our identity but that was also separate and subservient to it, and that it would be better at navigating the sea of data than we are.

   This would be a way to combine online environments like second life, social representation like myspace profiles, google searches, blogs, everything. Assuming you had the skills and things were kept open-source enough, you could even create your own abilities for the thing. Everything from Nintendo Miis to my cellphone ring is set to define “me” in the digital era. If we can come up with a digital “familiar” to do all of these things at once, it would combine a lot of different things into one personalized data interaction point.

   To go maybe a bit too far, it could even be something implanted in our brains, directly wired to our visual/audio centers and connected to whatever is standing in for the internet at that point. A real, personalized, voice in our heads…

   I mean, we already have flexible circuitry, proto-forms of nano-circuitry, the ability to scan someone’s visual cortex and guess what they’re viewing (based on good pre-scan testing), and simplistic brain-computer connections already (in which it is surprisingly easy for us to teach our brains how to interact with implanted electrodes to move a dot on a scree). It’s not that impossible, although I don’t know if it’s something that could happen any time soon.

   But at this point, I am more curious as to what you mean by “The Internet is a Fad”. Do you envision something to replace computers, fiber-optics, servers, etc, the whole interconnected system of machines, or more a massive re-imagining of what this system is used for?

5. speedbird Says:
   April 1st, 2008 at 3:42 am

   My own hunch?

   The only thing that survives will be hardcopy. Everything else will be revised.

6. speedbird Says:
   April 1st, 2008 at 3:44 am

   … but through that continual revision, something really interesting might start to become apparent.

7. Ian Says:
   April 1st, 2008 at 8:35 am

   Sometimes I think the internet is just training wheels for the self…

8. speedbird Says:
   April 2nd, 2008 at 3:03 am

   Nice.