The Shape of the Future

Last week, Sci-Fi writer Charlie Stross was invited to speak at a technology open day at engineering consultancy TNG Technology Consulting in Munich. He's posted a transcript of his discussion on his website, which features a fascinating analysis of where technology is going in the next 10-25 years. Instead of envisioning outlandish future developments, he looks at what the impact might be on society from very reasonable iterations of today's SOTA. "10Tb is an interesting number. That's a megabit for every second in a year -- there are roughly 10 million seconds per year. That's enough to store a live DivX video stream -- compressed a lot relative to a DVD, but the same overall resolution -- of everything I look at for a year, including time I spend sleeping, or in the bathroom. Realistically, with multiplexing, it puts three or four video channels and a sound channel and other telemetry -- a heart monitor, say, a running GPS/Galileo location signal, everything I type and every mouse event I send -- onto that chip, while I'm awake ... Add optical character recognition on the fly for any text you look at, speech-to-text for anything you say, and it's all indexed and searchable. 'What was the title of the book I looked at and wanted to remember last Thursday at 3pm?' Think of it as google for real life. "

Comments

Very roughly!

[mutende]

there are roughly 10 million seconds per year

Hm..., a mean tropical year has 365.24219878 days of each 86400 seconds, or 31,556,926 seconds. Ten billion seconds is slightly less than 317 years.

Re:Very roughly!

[charlie]

s/roughly/of the same order of magnitude/g

Innocent until proven Guilty

[amck]

This puts the burden of proof onto the defendant: they have to explain why they turned off the life recorder.

Read up as to why we have "Innocent until proven Guilty": there are a lot of circumstances that are not illegal, but frowned on
by society. (e.g. being Gay and in the US Military, etc.) : especially where you have politically-motivated prosecutors
such as in the US (less so in Britain and Ireland where there is a higher degree of independence for the Director of Public Prosecutions)
the law can become a tool of persection. You can be in deep trouble when doing something perfectly legal but frowned on
my a majority (or vocal/powerful minority) of your community.

Other issues of the panopticon society: imagine setting up a business (in your spare time,or whatever). Your employer / competitor
could bring a frivolous lawsuit just to see what you were doing on day X.