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

Wow

[Demona]

"Think of it as google for real life."

I'm sorry, sir. You have no life.

you subtle narcissists

[Anonymous Coward]

I love the geeky narcissist population here on slashdot (like you). It amuses me so much how you always so "subtley" try to sneak in some self-agrandizing bits into your posts to brag on yourselves. Sometimes its the standard, "you shouldn't stereotype nerds because I'm a nerd, but I'm a social and athletic god for reasons X, Y, Z," or its "let me illustrate a point through an analogy that lets me oh so subtlely and matter of factly mention my athletic or fighting prowess."

It's so funny. You take such a matter of fact tone when bragging in order to make it sound like you aren't bragging, that you aren't just showing off...that your awesomeness is somehow so obvious and common in your life and you are so used to it that it is natural that you just HAVE to mention it in your post to explain some unrelated point or another. However, so you know, it is very clumsy and not so seemlessly incorporated.