Comments on: Charlie Stross’s notion of Total History

By: Tom

Tom — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 15:46:38 +0000

@M1k3y – Upon further thought (and some sleep), I have a couple of little things to add. The first is that the reason that it is relatively easy to predict things like progress in storage (Memory Diamond) is because it is a fairly linear progression (a better word might be continuous), whereas things like algorithms are distinctly non-linear. Progress for these comes in spurts that are not necessarily intuitively connected.

Also, I think that part of the problem is that I am thinking of things as they are now. If we totally abandoned the notion of privacy, and started to give everyone a totally unique identifier, then it would be trivial to connect all of the data from one person into a continuum, and once you have one point on a continuum, you can find any other. I don’t think that this would solve the problems of data overload, but it would probably go a long way, if we were willing to sacrifice all aspects of privacy, which is something that is hard to imagine.

re: Little Brother – I just noticed that he changed the main character’s name from M1k3y to w1n5t0n.

By: m1k3y

m1k3y — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 06:01:08 +0000

@Tom re: algorithms, i totally agree!

the best candidate we seem to have at the moment is the whole folksonomy, tagging solution. time-stamping is easy, and will make possible searching chronologically. ditto using GPS etc to mark location.

but, given the failure of things like Machine Vision to make real progress in what, 20 years now, auto tagging things based on what you see is going to be a lot harder. (but would be oh so powerful if it became functional)

so yes, recording a massively detailed lifestream is one thing, but being able to make excellent use of it may be a much larger issue.

re: Little Brother.. it’s kinda the other way around.
except i’m not American, wasn’t a Hacker Kid and have never fought the Government or any of it’s Agencies.

By: Tom

Tom — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 03:33:17 +0000

@M1k3y – I agree that it is a solvable problem, but at the same time, solving it would require a departure from the current method of solving problems. The reason for this is that “we haven’t seen the same breakthroughs in the theory of algorithmics that we’ve seen in the engineering practicalities of building incrementally faster machines”. Basically, what he is saying is that the way we solve a technical problem at the moment is to throw Moore’s Law at it. Filtering through the the massive amount of raw data that will be created is not a problem that will be easy to solve by throwing clock cycles at it, instead it will be, by definition, a matter of breakthroughs in algorithms. The reason that I am pessimistic about this is that I imagine that the way to generate those breakthroughs is through investments in basic science, which unfortunately, is something that I am just not seeing. Even so, once we get to a point that the bottleneck of progress is our lack of development of algorithms, I am sure that we will start seeing advancement in this area.

By the way, would your name happen to be a reference to Cory Doctorow’s book, Little Brother?

By: m1k3y

m1k3y — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 02:07:39 +0000

@Tom - i think these are all problems we'll work out solutions for as we evolve along this path case in point, meta-SNS (or SNS aggregators?) like Socialthing! look very interesting.. -- speaking of which, anyone got a spare Socialthing invite? send some to me

By: Tom

Tom — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 23:16:13 +0000

My question is how useful will it all be? I mean, part of the problem will be data overload. Right now, finding someone just by their name is difficult bordering on impossible, and as the amount and variety of data that is available grows we will require more and more specific details to find a person.

I think that privacy will not so much disappear as be redefined. Instead of things never being publicly accessible, privacy will be more of a function of “blending into the crowd”. Then again, I could be totally wrong.

By: The Future is a Diamond Mine « Pawnstorm

The Future is a Diamond Mine « Pawnstorm — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 23:07:45 +0000

[...] science fiction, Society, storage, technology — Tom Dillon @ 4:05 pm The other day I was directed to the transcript of a speech by Science Fiction Author Charlie Stross, in which he talks about the [...]

By: chris joseph

chris joseph — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 04:41:02 +0000

infinitely recursive immersion… falling into total history and living life from the perspective of everyone

By: m1k3y

m1k3y — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 00:39:05 +0000

@Elana - indeed. to gank a comment from Charlie's post:

Akatsukami's Law of Data Storage: the accessibility of information is inversely proportional to the product density of the storage and the intricacy of the method used. Pigments smeared on tree pulp and ASCII plaintext will be available to us for millennia; lifelogs written to isotopic diamond will be useless in a decade, because the V26.0 drivers for the diamond readers will have been discarded when V26.1 was developed.

see also Sterling's Dead Media project. hopefully being mindful of such things will help us build a Future Facing archive of the Present

By: Elana

Elana — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 16:47:56 +0000

I’m an archaeology student, and I find it a little troubling that all of this data is being recorded in a way that can’t be retrieved if it were ever buried in the ground.

All it would take is one destruction event, and it would be all gone.

It’s not like clay tablets that can be deciphered even if everybody from that civilization is dead.

As long as there’s cultural continuity, we’re in good shape. But I actually see this revolution as being traceless. That is scary to me.

By: Damien

Damien — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 13:52:18 +0000

True enough, and that was part of what I wanted to say, here, but you expressed it much more clearly. The key thing is, then, that we have to be willing to have that conversation about our identity, about the constructed nature of it, and we have to be more able to look at certain unconscious processes, and make them at least partially conscious.

I don’t want to lose anyone, personally, because I take my identity not as a series of movements from one stage to the next, but a process of culmination and continual assessment and revision.