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

Life Recorders

[inviolet]

With the proper ironclad legal protections, Life Recorders will be a massive boon. Accused of a crime? No problem, just open up the datafile, fastforward to the time of the event, and see that we were actually sitting in the basement surfing alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.midgets.

And for those times when we want to actually bring a midget home, we might want to stop recording. After all, the purpose of privacy is to protect ourselves from the erratic rationality of our fellow humans' moral judgment (as well as the wholesale absence of rationality behind some of our laws). We've still got evolutionary wiring left over that causes us to feel physical pain when others disapprove, and so privacy is a rational demand.

But of course turning off our Life Recorder will be considered a forfeiture of our right to be Presumed Innocent.