Predicting the Future

A friend alerted me to a piece by sci-fi author Charles Stross that discusses the likely implications of rapid advances in bandwidth, storage capacity, and related technologies. Some choice comments on ...

...Cell Phones:

Now, we're still in the early stages of the uptake of mobile telephony, but some lessons are already becoming clear. Traditional fixed land-lines connect places, not people; you dial a number and it puts you through to a room in a building somewhere, and you hope the person you want to talk to is there. Mobile phones in contrast connect people, not places. You don't necessarily know where the person at the other end of the line is, what room in which building they're in, but you know who they are.

This has interesting social effects. Sometimes it's benign; you never have to wonder if someone you're meeting is lost or unable to find the venue, you never lose track of people. On the other hand, it has bad effects, especially when combined with other technologies: bullying via mobile phone is rife in British schools, and "happy slapping" wouldn't be possible without them. (Assaulting people while an accomplice films it with a camera phone, for the purpose of sending the movie footage around — often used for intimidation, sometimes used just for vicarious violent fun.)

... Storage capacity and "Life Logs":

Today, I can pick up about 1Gb of FLASH memory in a postage stamp sized card for that much money. fast-forward a decade and that'll be 100Gb. Two decades and we'll be up to 10Tb.

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. All the time. It's a life log; replay it and you've got a journal file for my life. Ten euros a year in 2027, or maybe a thousand euros a year in 2017.

... Ubiquitous Global Positioning:

Right now, Nokia is designing global positioning system receivers into every new
mobile phone they plan to sell. GPS receivers in a phone SIM card have been
demonstrated. GPS is exploding everywhere. It used to be for navigating
battleships; now it's in your pocket, along with a moving map.... In five
years, we'll all have phones that connect physical locations again, instead of
(or as well as) people. And we'll be raising a generation of kids who don't know
what it is to be lost, to not know where you are and how to get to some desired
destination from wherever that is.

Think about that. "Being lost" has been part of the human experience ever since our hominid ancestors were knuckle-walking around the plains of Africa. And we're going to lose it — at least, we're going to make it as unusual an experience as finding yourself out in public without your underpants.