Storing Everything
There’s another article today on the concept of people storing their whole lives on the computer. Microsoft is researching ways to manage the enormous amount of data we will start accumulating so that we can actually find that one picture we want from the millions we have stored.
At least one company has already released a hard drive that will store a terabyte of data for $1,200. Just three or four years ago, that level of storage was only affordable to large corporations. A terabyte is a trillion bytes, or a thousand billion bytes, or a million million bytes. That’s probably enough to record every conversation you have in your entire life, or record one picture every waking minute for eleven years.
Needless to say, there are a lot of privacy issues at stake here. Very shortly you will need to assume that, unless you are alone in the wilderness, the odds are that someone nearby is recording you. The devices will be so small and inconspicuous (Microsoft is anticipating jewelry that does the recording) that you will never know where it is.
Never mind the fact that we’ll end up spending more time looking at what we did in the past rather than living our lives. I suppose that will get to be self-limiting, however - who will want to look at pictures of themselves yesterday, if they spent all their time yesterday looking at pictures of the day before?
The other comment in the article that struck me is that “we’ll never need to throw anything away.” As someone who struggles to break free of deeply ingrained packrat tendencies, this could set me back years.