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Vint Cerf Warns About the Perishability Of Human Knowledge (vice.com)
Vint Cerf "worries about the decreasing longevity of our media, and, thus, about our ability as a civilization to self-document -- to have a historical record that one day far in the future might be remarked upon and learned from." An anonymous Slashdot reader quotes Motherboard:
Magnetic films do not quite have the staying power as clay tablets. Clay tablets are more resilient than papyrus manuscripts are more resilient than parchment are more resilient than printed photographs are more resilient than digital photographs. At stake, according to Cerf, is "the possibility that the centuries well before ours will be better known than ours will be unless we are persistent about preserving digital content.
"The earlier media seem to have a kind of timeless longevity while modern media from the 1800s forward seem to have shrinking lifetimes. Just as the monks and Muslims of the Middle Ages preserved content by copying into new media, won't we need to do the same for our modern content...? Unless we face this challenge in a direct way, the truly impressive knowledge we have collectively produced in the past 100 years or so may simply evaporate with time."
He points out that much of this century's digital documents can't be viewed without software. Do we need to start carving our web pages into clay tablets?
"The earlier media seem to have a kind of timeless longevity while modern media from the 1800s forward seem to have shrinking lifetimes. Just as the monks and Muslims of the Middle Ages preserved content by copying into new media, won't we need to do the same for our modern content...? Unless we face this challenge in a direct way, the truly impressive knowledge we have collectively produced in the past 100 years or so may simply evaporate with time."
He points out that much of this century's digital documents can't be viewed without software. Do we need to start carving our web pages into clay tablets?
The vast majority of things that are worth knowing will always be remembered and preserved. If the few that forgotten become necessary, they will be reinvented.
The world will continue spinning. No need for alarm.
The best way to preserved knowledge is to disseminate it widely. Or, to paraphrase Linus Torvalds, someone somewhere will mirror all the really important stuff.
That's why we have to support the Internet Archive library. Let's have a backup of everything there !! https://archive.org/
I've discussed this many times before. The loss is a much nearer term than thousands of years, too.
In the not so distant past, when Grandma passed on, the family went through and maintained all sorts of memorabilia. Pictures, letters, deeds, records/tapes/CDs, and other papers. Now, it's all digital. Facebook and possibly an external USB drive full of pictures that no one will ever know is there or find, music collections on laptops or iPods. All these things, and the records that they hold will wind up lost or in the trash and the information is lost forever.
Thanks to the digital age, the vast majority of people on this Earth will leave far less of a mark than the tiny feint scratches left by those before them. Sure, 'data live on forever' and records might exists somewhere, but data doesn't last unless someone is maintaining it and even then, it doesn;t mean that anyone will know the data is there or where to find it.
Vint Cerf "worries about the decreasing longevity of our media, and, thus, about our ability as a civilization to self-document -- to have a historical record that one day far in the future might be remarked upon and learned from."
I find it curious how often people forget how little of the knowledge of previous generations ever made it into written form. The vast majority of all human knowledge was never written down for most of human history and much of what was written has been long since lost. Today is no different. Furthermore people seem to forget that a tremendous amount of documents get printed so there are hard copy records of very substantial portions of the historical record. Thanks to modern printers FAR more than was ever available in previous generations and that will remain so. We should expect to lost substantial swaths of data over time. We're not going to be likely to be able to keep everything.
He points out that much of this century's digital documents can't be viewed without software.
Umm, I'd say 100% of digital documents cannot be viewed without software. If they could be viewed without software they wouldn't be digital documents.
(lightbulb) Now I see why one "surfs" the Internet!
It seems that there is an inverse proportionality between the durability of a storage medium and its storage density, and I don't know if we can overcome that easily, as we have the law of entropy working against us. A stone carving or a clay tablet can overcome hundreds and thousands of quantum events, and they will still be stone and clay. A papyrus starts to rot, when its molecules break up, and it gets brittle and is more easily destroyed. Printed paper is thinner and has smaller letters than a hand written papyrus and thus even small damage can erase whole words or paragraphs. And with a hard disk or flash memory, even single quantum events can erase or flip a bit, and a two bit error is already unrecoverable, and any more damage loses large swats of the file.
. . . some very smart people ARE already working on this issue, and have been for a long time. See the Digital Preservation Network and Internet Archive for starters.
It is happening as we speak.
Mid-20th century newsreels--an important history of the time--are sitting on shelves in film canisters, quietly disintegrating.
There are people who would like to copy them forward onto durable media, but they can't because the newsreels are copyrighted, but the copyright holders either can't be located or aren't interested in preserving them.
They will be dust long before they enter the public domain.
We had this exact problem at a former place of employment, i.e. we had contract requirements to provide access to original oil field data for the 25-year lifetime of the field, the problem was that most of this data was in the form of seismic data locked into a specific version of the exploration sw.
The solution we came up with depended on making a virtual machine image of everything needed to run the original application & data, including license files and user databases, and then freeze the system clock: This way we could restart that image at any point in the future and as far as the sw would know it was still 2005.
We would still need regular maintenance, to make sure that newer versions of the virtualization platform could still run the original image. In the worst case we expected to have to add an additional virtualization layer, i.e. so we could run the 2005 sw inside a 2015 virtual machine which would run inside a 2030 VM host.
This approach has of course been used to good effect in order to save classic games.
Terje
"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"
The issue isn't just that the media will decay, it's that the media is too cheap. There is no incentive to curate our documents, and we will end up with so many still in existence, no-one in future ages will have the inclination to wade through the rubbish.
When people had paper photographs, they soon accumulated boxes of albums, and by 1990, those holiday snaps from 1970 were kind of dusty and not worth keeping. So people chucked them out. But of course they looked through them first and kept a couple of photos, maybe even got those framed. All of which means that when they died in 2010, their kids had only maybe 100 photos to look through, and decide what was worth holding on to.
Now, our holiday snaps are uploaded to the cloud. They aren't a nuisance, and we never get rid of any. When we die, maybe our kids will be able to get a drive or an account key, or something, with 20,000 photos on. Do you really think they will do more than look at a few random ones, before adding them to their own 5,000 photos?
Same with our emails, our whatsapp messages, our blog posts.
The total amount of media from our age will still be significant - the sheer quantity produced ensures that much will remain. But what remains intact won't do so because of its significance to our age. We don't bury our most valuable items in the ground for safety, or lock them in huge chests, or keep them in safes.
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we switched to modern media not because it lasts longer. It's more reliable because it's more easily copied/produced. You never had the option to use stone tablets for current knowledge -- there's too much knowledge now.
I grew up with my mother suggesting something very interesting: in 1925, if archeologists had dug up a microchip, would they have known what it was? Or just thought it was junk, or a toy, and moved on?
If we want to "document" knowledge, in an ever-lasting way, it's the same game as it's always been: you can't do it with language at all. Sorry. Language doesn't survive. Cave wall drawings are meaningless. Hieroglyphics are useless without culture. Dialects, subtleties, and context are required to interpret language. "bread crumbs" means nothing without a house made of gingerbread.
So how do we "document" knowledge? That's easy: reference objects. For example, the knowledge of how to build a telescope is best "documented" by building a telescope specifically for future generations to study -- maybe bigger, maybe with more obvious design decisions, maybe with more understandable materials, maybe with easily disassembling parts.
Reference builds. I'll say it now. Distant generations learn from objects, not from documentation. We dig up old pottery, and understand what sorts of tools were used. We don't dig up blueprints for pots. Take a reference telescope, and study it for a week. You'll learn everything you need to know about how it works, how it's used, what it can do.
Objects.
Academics are, well, merely academic. We've lost the concept of learning from observation. Remember grade-9 science's how-to-read-a-fish? Most of my friends can't read their own dog.
And a few hundred years later Christians committed xenocide in the Americas, subjugated Africa, Indian Subcontinent, forced drugs on China.
People suck. The difference is though, Muslim nations allowed freedom of religion long before Western nations even knew what that meant. Sure, the West leads on that front now, and many Islamic nations are far from free or tolerant. However, in the time frame that you are attacking them, the middle ages, they WERE the most enlightened people on the planet.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Intellectual exchanges like this^ need to be preserved that for posterity.
Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1683/
No sig today...