The Shape of the Future

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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 visioning 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. “

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Technorati Tags: Trends, Future, Charlie Stross

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