Shaping the Future

Charlie Stross is a great Sci Fi writer, and here is a speech he gave a while ago, with some very interesting musings on technology, memory, privacy, and the changes to come. He also maintain's he's probably wrong.

It's quite long, but I really enjoyed it. I love thinking about this stuff.

Some bits:

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by The Speech

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.

---

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by The Speech

Six hundred grams of this material would be enough to store lifelogs for everyone on the planet (at an average population of, say, eight billion people) for a year. Sixty kilograms can store a lifelog for the entire human species for a century.

---

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by The Speech

Sooner or later there won't be a new model to upgrade to every year, the fab lines will have paid for themselves, and the bottom will fall out of the consumer electronics industry, just as it did for the steam locomotive workshops before them.

---

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by The Speech

"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.

---

etc.

The chokepoint is energy. Especially portable energy, but energy altogether.

nothing too new in this. Most of his predictions have been covered in various episodes of Ghost in the Shell Stand alone complex.

It will be interesting to see though, how and when basic human interaction crumbles. For the most part, we live under a moral code derived from one of the three big monotheist religions. None of us live up to these codes, and yet it is ingrained in us and how we treat others. Everyone does something that someone else will find sick, etc. Joe Bob beats his kids but thinks fags are monsters. Tom Brandy is gay and thinks Joe Bob should be shot for beating his kids.

Society works under this moral code because we are able to hide these parts of our personalties. But as the site points out, one day that will become a thing of the past. There will come a time were people can down load in video, if not the very emotions and feelings of their ancestors being perverts, monsters, stupid, druggies, gay, prudes, retarded, handicapped, etc, etc. Your great great great great great grandson will be able to download video of your great great great grandson shooting up on a cyber drug and fucking his buddy Jim.

And going by our track record, something horrible is going to happen before we do anything about this unstoppable future.

I think it's as equally possible that a nuclear war or natural disaster could destroy a majority of the human race. We're bound for another dark age, without those transitional periods in human history our world would likely be much worse.

Robot overlords. I mean it.

Great article, thanks!

Bookmarked for when I can wrap my head around it properly.

Energy issues i imagine will eventually go away if we manage the riddle of energy and mass.

maybe. The energy problem may never be solved or just not solved in time. However, the end of oil won't be the end of us. Man and his technology will march on. But society will change greatly. It will probably be a mishmash of what we have now, and the lifestyle of the 1700 or 1800s

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by buttcheeks

Society works under this moral code because we are able to hide these parts of our personalties. But as the site points out, one day that will become a thing of the past. There will come a time were people can down load in video, if not the very emotions and feelings of their ancestors being perverts, monsters, stupid, druggies, gay, prudes, retarded, handicapped, etc, etc. Your great great great great great grandson will be able to download video of your great great great grandson shooting up on a cyber drug and fucking his buddy Jim.

---

Maybe we only do these "sick" things because we know or at least believe we can get away with them. Maybe privacy is just an ephemeral shroud for wrongdoing.

I don't believe that, but you could make the argument.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by burgundy

Maybe we only do these "sick" things because we know or at least believe we can get away with them. Maybe privacy is just an ephemeral shroud for wrongdoing.

I don't believe that, but you could make the argument.

---

wrong is very subjective and very relative.

When you were a young teenager, you probably didn't admit to playing with yourself. Now that you are an adult you probably don't give a shit about admitting to doing so or that you have in the past if you no longer.

And yet you have no plans of ever talking about that probably, with your kids or grandkids. But there will probably come a day when, if the things on that site come to be, that your great great great grandson can see every last time you touched your willy wonka.

Now, what will people in the future do with that gray area? Most people would argue that masturbation is ok. And yet there is a small nagging part of conscience that tells us to not talk about it with certain people.

Oh I'm sure you are right, for the most part people will stop doing a lot of major bad things. People will no longer steel because they know their own minds can rat them out. People will probably stop lying, or bulling, or other stuff like that.

But what about the gray areas? The things that are ok to do with friends or lovers but are not things that we want all of society to know about? whats going to happen when a mother can watch video of her kids sneaking out Saturday night to get him some?