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The other side of the speed equation is, of course, expense; one-off showpieces for research labs and corporate "visioning" centers are well and good, but their effects are generally achieved at prohibitive cost. In order to support meaningfully ubiquitous systems, componentry must be cheap. Current projections—and not necessarily the most optimistic—indicate that processors with speeds on the order of 2 GHz will cost about what ordinary household electrical components (e.g., dimmer switches) do now, at the end of the decade or very soon thereafter. This would allow an ordinary-sized room to be provisioned with such an abundance of computational power that it is difficult to imagine it all being used, except as part of some gridlike approach to a particularly intractable problem. Less extravagant implementations could be accomplished at negligible cost.

When there are that many spare processing cycles available, some kind of market mechanism might evolve to allocate them: an invisible agora going on behind the walls, trading in numeric operations. But we can leave such speculations for other times. For the moment, let's simply note that—even should Moore's Law begin to crumble and benchmark speeds stagnate rather than continuing their steep upward climb—processing capacity presents no obstacle to the emergence of full-fledged ubiquitous services.

Thesis 60

The necessary storage capacity already exists.

It's easy to infer that a panoply of ubiquitous systems running at all times—systems whose operation by definition precedes users, as we've noted—is going to churn up enormous quantities of data. How and where is all this information going to be stored? Will the issue of storage itself present any obstacle to the real-world deployment of everyware?

We can derive a useful answer by, again, extrapolating not from the best currently available systems, but from those at the middle of the pack. The iPod shuffle I wear when I go running, for example, is a circa-2004 solid-state storage device, with only incidental moving parts, that boasts a capacity of 1 GB. This is about a day and a half's worth of music encoded with middling fidelity, a few hours' worth at the highest available resolution. It achieves this (as Apple's advertising was pleased to remind us) inside a form factor of around the same volume as a pack of chewing gum, and it's already been rendered obsolete by newer and more capacious models.

A day and a half sure sounds like a decent amount of music to pack into a few cubic centimeters; certainly it's suggestive of what might be achieved if significant parts of a structure were given over to solid-state storage. But hard-ubicomp enthusiasts already dream of far greater things. On a chilly night in GÖteborg in late 2002, Lancaster University HCI pioneer Alan Dix described an audacious plan to record in high fidelity every sense impression a human being ever has—favoring me with a very entertaining estimate of the bandwidth of the human sensorium, the total capacity necessary to store all of the experiences of an average lifetime, and a guess as to what volume would suffice to do so: "If we start recording a baby's experiences now, by the time she's 70 all of it will fit into something the size of a grain of sand."

If I recall correctly, Dix's order-of-magnitude guess was that no more than 20 TB (each terabyte is 1,000 GB) would be required to record every sensory impression of any sort that you have in the entire course of your life. And when you run the numbers—making the critical assumption that increases in storage capacity will continue to slightly outpace the 24-month doubling period specified by Moore's law for transistor density—mirabile dictu, it does turn out to be the case that by mid-2033, it will at least theoretically be possible to store that amount of information in a nonvolatile format the size and weight of a current-generation iPod nano. (The grain of sand appears not long thereafter.)

As of the end of 2005, the numbers undernetting this rather science-fictiony-sounding