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. "

Re:Memories!

[Xiph]

Do you mean that 800 Tb disk that's lying in the corner, containing everything you've ever done? Sorry, we're not allowed to return it to you, before it has been fully screened by a miniluv representative =)

Finally...

[tttonyyy]

..when we get to 4. PROFIT!!! we can rewind a step and see what the hell 3. ???? was that people keep banging on about.

Re:Very roughly!

[clickclickdrone]

I think that's called an engineering approximation.

Re:Interesting but...

[Bloke down the pub]

Just wait long enough and he'll be wrong agian.