Interesting and insightful analysis. The orders-of-magnitude gains in information density and throughput are indeed impressive.
Two problems, in my view: 1) At what point (if we haven't already passed it) does the sheer amount and throughput rate of information overwhelm human capacity to comprehend and process? We still have essentially the same brains and sensory systems as our Neolithic forebears. Recording information on clay tablets with reeds, or even using typewriters, forced people to be economical in what they recorded, and placed a natural rate-limiting "filter" on what people could take in and make sense of.
2) How durable and transmittable are our current information recording media and 'decoding' software? What would I do if I found a box of IBM punch cards and thought there might be valuable information stored on them? (This actually happened to me when I was a grad student, during the Late Holocene). What would happen 50 years from now if someone found one of my 2026 USB thumb drives with a Microsoft Word document? Could they find a device with a USB-A port? A system that could still read a Word document?
Late Bronze Age stele can still be read and understood.
I assume (hope) people are thinking about these challenges now.
Great questions Will. As to the first, our own ingenuity solves this. AI, for instance, gives us a means of wading through all of that data we have created.
As to your second, I actually was going to discuss this very issue in this article but decided not too because it was already too lengthy.
There is almost an inverse relationship between the longevity and readability of media and data density.
Stone tablet can last thousands of years; SSDs only a 3-5 at best.
it's not a hard and fast rule though. We can etch data onto diamond with high density and it will last a very long time. We will probably need to start saving the important things on more permanent mediums.
Really enjoyed this, JK. It made me wonder whether AI represents another step in the same progression. We first learned to preserve knowledge outside the human brain, then made its storage essentially limitless and its retrieval nearly instantaneous. But human capacity to absorb and use all that knowledge remained a constraint. AI may now be reducing that constraint as well, allowing us to make use of knowledge we could never individually learn or even find.
Interesting and insightful analysis. The orders-of-magnitude gains in information density and throughput are indeed impressive.
Two problems, in my view: 1) At what point (if we haven't already passed it) does the sheer amount and throughput rate of information overwhelm human capacity to comprehend and process? We still have essentially the same brains and sensory systems as our Neolithic forebears. Recording information on clay tablets with reeds, or even using typewriters, forced people to be economical in what they recorded, and placed a natural rate-limiting "filter" on what people could take in and make sense of.
2) How durable and transmittable are our current information recording media and 'decoding' software? What would I do if I found a box of IBM punch cards and thought there might be valuable information stored on them? (This actually happened to me when I was a grad student, during the Late Holocene). What would happen 50 years from now if someone found one of my 2026 USB thumb drives with a Microsoft Word document? Could they find a device with a USB-A port? A system that could still read a Word document?
Late Bronze Age stele can still be read and understood.
I assume (hope) people are thinking about these challenges now.
Great questions Will. As to the first, our own ingenuity solves this. AI, for instance, gives us a means of wading through all of that data we have created.
As to your second, I actually was going to discuss this very issue in this article but decided not too because it was already too lengthy.
There is almost an inverse relationship between the longevity and readability of media and data density.
Stone tablet can last thousands of years; SSDs only a 3-5 at best.
it's not a hard and fast rule though. We can etch data onto diamond with high density and it will last a very long time. We will probably need to start saving the important things on more permanent mediums.
Really enjoyed this, JK. It made me wonder whether AI represents another step in the same progression. We first learned to preserve knowledge outside the human brain, then made its storage essentially limitless and its retrieval nearly instantaneous. But human capacity to absorb and use all that knowledge remained a constraint. AI may now be reducing that constraint as well, allowing us to make use of knowledge we could never individually learn or even find.
That's a good point. AI is making all of that data more accessible than ever before