Total Recall - C. Gordon Bell [5]
But is it really feasible to record everything that happens in a person’s life? Shockingly perhaps, the memory needed to store a person’s lifetime of recorded experience is already here and affordable and is always growing cheaper. The rate of price decrease is given by Moore’s Law, which states that the transistor density that can be etched onto the silicon wafer of a microchip doubles every two years. This means that every two years, the cost of computer memory is cut in half—so you can afford to buy twice as much as last year. Moore’s Law was first published in 1965 and has held up with remarkable consistency ever since.
The growth of digital storage capacity has been staggering. In 1970, a disk that could store twenty megabytes (twenty million bytes) was the size of a washing machine and cost twenty thousand dollars. Today a terabyte (one trillion bytes) costs a hundred dollars and is the size of a paperback book. By 2020 a terabyte will cost the same as a good cup of coffee and will probably be in your cell phone. One hundred dollars will then buy you around 250 terabytes of storage, enough to hold tens of thousands of hours of video and tens of millions of photographs. This should satisfy most lifeloggers’ recording needs for an entire life.
In fact, digital storage capacity is increasing faster than our ability to pull information back out. Once upon a time, you had to be extremely judicious and stingy about which pieces of data you hung on to. You had to be thrifty with your electronic pieces of information, or bits, as we call them. But starting around 2000 it became trivial and cheap to sock away tremendous piles of data. The hard part is no longer deciding what to hold on to, but how to efficiently organize it, sort it, access it, and find patterns and meaning in it. This is a primary challenge for the engineers developing the software that will fully unleash the power of Total Recall.
Where is the desktop PC in this Total Recall revolution? Its impending downfall has been predicted by Silicon Valley denizens for years. I believe the PC is destined for a demotion but is unlikely to vanish. The P in PC will still stand for “personal”—in fact, it will be more personal than ever before, involved in every aspect of your life. But the C will change from computer to computer ecosystem . Your desktop computer will be just one of many tools at your disposal for e-memory management. You will own an assortment of small, fungible, more modest computers—in fact, you probably already do. They are in your cell phone, in your appliances, and in your car. Increasingly, they will be in your clothes and on your body. They will be virtually everywhere.
C will also stand for cloud. This refers to a new way of using the Internet in which data gets stored and software is run “out there” in the abstract ether of cyberspace—in the cloud—rather than locally on your own PC. Ultimately, the cloud turns information processing and storage into a metered utility just like electricity and water (with the difference that there will be many free offerings). It’s like having the power of computers “on tap.”
With cloud computing, your data becomes untethered from particular devices. Your e-memory follows you wherever you go, accessible from any device you happen to be using. You, not your desktop’s hard drive, are the hub of your digital belongings. Many of us experience this now with our e-mail, which we access from our desktop PC, our notebook PC, our smartphones, or any device we might borrow with a Web browser. Increasingly, everything in your e-memory will be accessible anywhere, anytime, from any device at hand.
Of course, many of your devices will have vast storage; your cell phone will hold more than a terabyte, and your notebook computer will carry more than two hundred