A world in a grain of sand

I just read this little bit of speculation:


"The Tech Lab: Charles Stross

UK science fiction writer Charles Stross, author of novels Accelerando and Singularity Sky, posits a future in which all human experience is record[ed] on devices the size of a grain of sand.

...For the past 50 years we've become used to computers getting cheaper and more powerful exponentially - doubling in performance (or halving in price) roughly every 18 months.

But a parallel trend in data storage means that storage space is becoming twice as plentiful on a similar time scale - and our ability to generate data to store is also increasing, as witness the 4m CCTV cameras around the UK, and about 70m cellphone accounts, of which maybe half are associated with camera phones able to record video.

Sooner or later they're all going to be switched on, all the time and our data storage capacity is growing so fast that we need not delete anything ever again. ...If we can figure out how to read and write data on the atomic scale, you could store the sum total of all the data we recorded in 2003 on a grain of sand.

And some time after our demise, this information will be available to historians. And what a mass of information it will be. For the first time ever, they'll be able to know who was where, when, and what they said; just what words were exchanged in smoky beer halls 30 years before the revolutions that haven't happened yet: who it was who claimed to be there when they founded the Party (but didn't join until years later): and where the bodies are buried.

...For the first time ever, the human species will have an accurate and unblinking, unvarnished view of its own past as far back as the dark ages of the first decade of the 21st Century, when recorded history "really" began."

... and then we'll really go fucking mental.