Google For Real Life

Brad DeLong provides a fascinating exerpt of Charlie Stross's recent speech in Munich. Bottom line - I can't even conceive of the proper way to think about the mid-term future let alone actual predictions.

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... enough to store a live DivX video stream... of everything I look at for a year.... It's a life log; replay it and you've got a journal file for my life.... Why would anyone want to do this?... Initially, it'll be edge cases. Police officers on duty: it'd be great to record everything they see, as evidence. Folks with early stage neurodegenerative conditions like Alzheimers: with voice tagging and some sophisticated searching, it's a memory prosthesis. 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.