Charles Stross keynote at USENIX 2011
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2011/08/usenix-2011-keynote-...
has, as usual, a lot of good thinking. In particular he made a few points that might be of relevance to EP:
However, the mesh as described in EP seems to be a bit far away:
This leaves aside a third model, that of peer to peer mesh networks with no actual cellcos as such – just lots of folks with cheap routers. I’m going to provisionally assume that this one is hopelessly utopian, a GNU vision of telecommunications that can’t actually work on a large scale because the routing topology of such a network is going to be nightmarish unless there are some fat fibre optic cables somewhere in the picture. It’s kind of a shame – I’d love to see a future where no corporate behemoths have a choke hold on the internet – but humans aren’t evenly distributed geographically.The mesh is likely the *local* systems, but for moving data any further (and especially at good speed) you need big pipes, and they require coordination and investment. Hence Nimbus, and presumably some important Titanian Microcorps that run much communications in the outer system. He mentioned that the maximum wireless bandwidth may be around 2 terabytes per second (split between all users in a cell). If cells are small (like rooms, with the "landline" connection in the walls) that means overload is rarely a problem, except when egocasting. My own standard off-the-cuff estimate of an ego is somewhere around 15 terabytes or upwards, suggesting that it could be transmitted in just a few seconds. In practice it likely takes longer (error correction, other users, larger files), perhaps a minute. Transhuman senses can't take in more than a few gigabit per second or so, so running wireless XP/lifeblogging is entirely feasible. The real headache will be communications lags, both over long distances (see http://www.aleph.se/EclipsePhase/comms.pdf for some more notes on this, based on this thread) and due to packets jumping across lots of little servers.
With lifelogging and other forms of ubiquitous computing mediated by wireless broadband, securing our personal data will become as important to individuals as securing our physical bodies. Unfortunately we can no more expect the general public to become security professionals than we can expect them to become judo black-belts or expert marksmen. Security is going to be a perpetual, on-going problem.And this is why InfoSec is a survival skill. People without it, who rely on their muses, are delicious sheep for the wolves out there...
We can expect the pace of innovation to slow drastically, once we can no longer count on routinely more powerful computing hardware or faster network connections coming along every eighteen months or so. But some forms of personal data – medical records, for example, or land title deeds – need to remain accessible over periods of decades to centuries. Lifelogs will be similar; if you want at age ninety to recall events from age nine, then a stable platform for storing your memory is essential, and it needs to be one that isn’t trivially crackable in less than eighty-one years and counting. Robustness and durabilitiy are going to be at a premium in the futureThis is an interesting point. If robust and secure long-term storage that is hard to crack has been developed, this means there is a *lot* of pre-Fall data that is tough to get at. Some systems will also have generations of data. But the Fall might have disrupted a lot of these - people used to storage solutions that withstood wars and upheavals suddenly lost everything.
we’re moving towards an age where we may have enough bandwidth to capture pretty much the totality of a human lifespan, everything except for what’s going on inside our skulls.Just to note, 10^11 neurons firing at ~100 Hz means 10^13 action potentials per second. Each can be indexed by time (say 2 bytes for when in a second frame it occurred, frames stored in sequence) and which neuron (36 bits). So one second of total experience is 65 terabytes (uncompressed). A year is about one zettabyte; a lot, but still storable in 0.02 grams of diamond storage.
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