Jinn of Quality and Risk

Few people seem to fully realize what is happening and where we're going. Dan Gillmor: I just installed the 2003 Encyclopedia Britannica on my laptop computer. It came on a DVD disk and took up about 2.4 gigabytes of space. This is the same encyclopedia, with multimedia additions, that used to take up a huge bookshelf. Now I carry it around. Gillmor has other interesting comments. The most immediate and visible consequence of disk-drive progress will be the end of publishing models that tie cost (and profit) to physical volume and difficulty of access — this subsumes music now, movies soon, and encyclopedias already. Copyright protection as we know it cannot survive as is.

Another change with far-reaching consequences will be constant, ubiquitous recording. At 56 kbps (decent for voice recordings), the sounds of a day of human life can be entirely recorded in 600 MB — that's about one CD (yes, we're ignoring silence and sleep). One year at 128 kbps would require merely 480 GB of storage, so a 100-year lifespan would fill 46 TB. Ten years from today, a 50 terabyte disk will be common, cost less than $200, and fit in an iPod. We'll record and have access to absolutely all our conversations (and we'll need the equivalent of personal Googles to index it and search through it). Future generations will also have access to it. Imagine being able to listen to all of Aristotle's lectures, live. Or witnessing the conversations surrounding the Declaration of Independence. Or hearing the varying accents of several generations of your ancestors, as well as recognizing peculiar expressions running in the family. From the moment ubiquitous recording takes off, past words and deeds will remain close to the present.

On a more prosaic level, lying will be somewhat more complicated. Honesty and virtue will soar. Lifetime video/holographic recording would follow soon enough. People will be more self-aware. Vice and crime will be in trouble. 

I'm a newsjogger, not a newsreader. That's what news aggregators are good at supporting. 

One year ago: Professor [Jeffrey Hillman] has genetically-modified the mouth-dwelling bacterium Streptococcus mutans to produce a strain that does not create lactic acid — the agent of tooth decay. A single treatment could confer lifetime protection... His company, Oragenics, hopes to complete medical tests, please the FDA, and start selling the product by 2006-07. Faster, please! Note that toothbrushes will still be needed. 

When risk management involves world events and millions of lives. IHT on the upcoming war: Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has a four-to-five-page typewritten catalog of risks he keeps in his desk drawer. He refers to it constantly, updates it regularly and has incorporated suggestions from senior military commanders into it and discussed it with President George W. Bush. 

USS Clueless: In engineering we have a saying that there comes a time when the product has to be ripped out of the hands of the engineers and shipped over their screams. ... There's an optimum point; ship too soon and risk that the product will perform badly. Ship too late and you may miss your market window, or [give] a competitor time to release something which will hurt you. Get it right and you can make millions of dollars; get it wrong and you can lose that much, and maybe even see your company go out of business.