Toward a Planetary Memory

One passing statistic of Dr. Mannon's presentation, however, stuck with me. The capacity of hard drive storage on a desktop will exceed the capacity of an average municipal library (XX gigabytes) in a short time.

Instead of continuing to concentrate on Seagate's technical advancements, I began to think more and more about the broader picture, the social and economical implications of desktop computers on which, just possibly, one might be able to contain all of the knowledge of the human race. Computers have been called the most significant advancement in human development since the printing press, and that was when they were just personal work tools, capable of managing every form of human communication from alpha-numerics to motion pictures.

Computers then earned the singular achievement of starting yet another revolution by making the global Internet a reality, a development which in itself surpasses the social impact of Guttenberg's invention. But we aren't finished witnessing the impact computers will have on our society. In my opinion, the addition of practically unlimited data storage on a personal computer will initiate a third computer revolution, the magnitude of which may change forever the way humans think and act.

To understand this, one must first consider what "practically" means in the phrase, "practically unlimited data storage." In order to achieve such a feat, it is not necessary to design a hard drive with infinite capacity, only a hard drive capable of storing everything any user would want to have immediately available. Some folks are quite happy with 1.2 gig hard drives, because they never need to access more than that amount. But most of us in the media business have hungrier eyes.

I would venture that a fair definition of "practically unlimited" would be bit greater than the total knowledge of the human race at any given time. Set aside, for a moment, the need to continually update this data with every new movie, every CD, every newspaper article, and the finite amount would be, according to Dr. Mannon, about 275 trillion (terra) bytes. This is a big number, but it includes everything; Plato, Lao Tse, Tabor, Luke, Buddha, Mohammed, Griffith, CNN, both Lennons, Azimov, the works.

If we gathered all the online magnetic media in the world, all hard drives, disk drives, digital tape drives (not resting on library shelves, but threaded up in playback devices, ready to output), the total capacity would come to about 175 terrabytes. In other words, we currently fall short of being able to digitally store everything we know and the capability to do so, does not appear foreseeable.

The reason is that our global data is growing at the pace of about 30% per year, while the technology of hard drive storage, aggressive as it is, with advancements in technology and a constantly growing user base, is only growing at 20% per year. Even with all of the hypothetical advancements envisioned by Dr. Mannon and his colleagues throughout his specialty, the line representing capacity does not cross the line representing total data, in fact, the two continue to diverge at significant angles!

Why then, would you think I am so excited by the social implications of those lines crossing? Because of data redundancy.

After the seminar, I asked Dr. Mannon what the graph would look like if we extracted from the global database, all audiovisual media; all movies and music, the most data-dense elements of the library. Dr. Mannon paused for a long moment to think. "Then," he concluded, "The lines would definitely cross, perhaps very soon."

In other words, if we limited our needs to just alpha-numeric data, soon, we could conceivably contain all of the knowledge of the human race on a desktop computer. What, you might ask, would be the use of that, considering we have the Internet from which to extract such knowledge at any time, and the Internet is continually updated.

Ah, but the Internet is full of lies. Only a small percentage of the knowledge contained in the Internet is verifiable and reliable. A lot of the Internet is repetitious as well. Much of it is outright plagiarized.

This leads one to consider the possible relationships between the Internet and the human knowledge base. How much of the Library of Congress, for instance (hardly a replica of the entire knowledge of the human race, but a good analog from which to draw useful conclusions) is redundant, false or obsolete?

What if there were a service company, let's call it the Verity Corporation, that would go through all existing data and certify it according to well accepted journalistic and scientific criteria. Furthermore, legal experts in Verity could ascertain the original authorship of all data, assigning various percentages of credit to each person submitting data to the library. Such a company would provide two highly prized commodities; concentrated data with statistically insured levels of reliability and a method of rewarding creators proportionate to the value of their creations.

If you wanted to know something, for instance, you might pay a small fee to Verity to obtain and deliver a piece of data which was assigned a specific degree of reliability which Verity insured, to the value of your liability. If you created data, you could submit it to Verity, and if validated as original and/or reliable, Verity would see to it that royalties were paid to you whenever your creation was accessed. Further, Verity would fund a global copyright and patent litigation arm that would make piracy unprofitable.

Aside from a wonderfully profitable company, the net result of a company like Verity (and there are already a host of companies, called dataminers, who are laying the groundwork) would make it highly probable that the density of all alphanumeric human knowledge could be practically reduced by exponential degrees.

What, then, about the media we create, audio and video? My guess is that the same economies of reduction possible in alphanumeric data can be realized several times over in audio-video data, but even if I'm wrong, the continuing methods of media distribution will continue.

But here's a for instance you might consider. How many action movies contain a shot of a vast explosion from which come running toward the camera, two heroes costumed in the masculine gender? Assume for a moment, a new software tool that compresses the common elements of movies the way motion JPEG compresses the common elements of successive frames of film. What if there were just one generic explosion in the database, with the running figures of two trousered bodies upon which the program could instantaneously superimpose the faces of the currently required heroes? How many gigabytes of picture data do we save with that one scene alone?

I know, you're laughing now, thinking that I've twisted this essay into a satirical vein. Indulge me a moment and let's continue to the vast social implications I evoked earlier. Let's assume now, that every person on earth had access to ALL the knowledge, ALL the data, ALL the movies and records on our desktop. How would things be different?

Would scientific research accelerate leading to longer, more productive lives? Would politicians be able to lie? Would governments be able to suppress their populations? Would writers or musicians be able to plagiarize? Would there be a greater impetus to creative thought? Would creative thought be better distributed for the enlightenment of all? Would education be the same? Would the hunger to know be faster sated?

In 1456, when Guttenberg invented the printing press, technology advanced much slower from inventor to populace. Printed works did not immediately percolate into the commoner's world until much later, evidenced by a law, passed in 1583 which prohibited all but the nobility from reading the bible. In 1492, coincidentally, the Spanish Inquisition started, a device which served the power elite in preserving knowledge as a privilege of rank. And yet every 18th and 19th century democratic revolution, from the USA and France to all the republics of South America, owes its origination and success to the printed word. Is is a coincidence that the rise of computer technology parallels the fall of the world's remaining royalties and dictatorships?

One key factor in computer technology's political and social power is the availability of the Internet to all acting members of the population. Several factors limit this availability: the relatively high cost of computer, the literacy to use it, and the cost of maintaining Internet access.

I wrote this article in Lima, Peru, where many people have sophisticated computers but very few have Internet access. A global knowledge database, residing on the desktop, may penetrate areas of need faster than a low cost, continually accessible Internet link.

Global knowledge accessibility is a bigger thing than being able to read the bible at your local place of worship. This is being able to read and see and feel every original thought that any creative individual from the dawn of time until this very moment conceived and then, should your own mind be capable, to create your own gems of wisdom and place them, however humbly, in the crown of human knowledge. It makes you think, doesn't it?