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Cost of storing all human audio-visual experiences

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Re: Cost of storing all human audio-visual experiences

#31

Post by clarkmoody »

Zimahl wrote: post #25
binarymax wrote: post #2

It's funny, because in 1000 years, this is an anthropologists dream come true (assuming the storage can be preserved that long by eventually copying to a less volatile medium). Is it worth sacrificing our privacy now, so that their perfect glimpse of us in "the stupid ages" teaches them enough to learn from all the mistakes we keep repeating?

Man, this brings up a lot of privacy questions. Especially around who gets to look at what. I mean is this a personal archive that only unlocks after your death? Is it open to anyone? Is it available to law enforcement? This about this: Your entire sex life is replayable. This includes being with someone or solo action. Do you want you grandkids watching that? No longer are we contemplating whether someone committed…

Robin Williams played in The Final Cut[1], which is a film that explores the idea of making a post-death movie called a "Rememory," usually shown at the deceased's memorial service. Williams plays the role of the editor of the Rememory, and he faces the internal and external dilemmas associated with uncovering all of a person's gritty life experiences.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Final_Cut_(2004_film)

Re: Cost of storing all human audio-visual experiences

#32

Post by mistercow »

I know it may be a little tangential to the original point, but I reckon you could cut this down considerably if you had more accurate psychophysical models than we do. Humans are probably not actually processing anywhere near 1.25 mbps of input, and as far as our actual experience, we're discarding the vast majority of the information we even take in.

Consider, for example, that if you could perfectly predict the exact path of a person's fovea as they watched an SD movie, you could aggressively compress everything more than a dozen pixels away from that. A few pixels further, and you wouldn't even need to store chroma information at all. Let's say you can do that at 100 kbps, and the pixels on the fovea are 1 mbps. That would put your total bitrate at about 105kbps for video. If you don't optimize audio at all, that brings the cost down to about $170B/year.

And that's not even with new psychophysics; it's just better input. Sure, playing it back would be hard, but in principle, you could fool a brain into thinking it was experiencing the data firsthand. I think it's reasonable to think this is still a massive upper bound. It's not unreasonable to think that a lifetime of human sensory experience could be encoded on the order of hundreds of gigabytes, if not less.

Re: Cost of storing all human audio-visual experiences

#33

Post by jerf »

onebaddude wrote: post #19
jerf wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please compute for me the number of bits per atom you will be storing if current trends continue for a thousand years.

Please compute for me when we'll reach the peak of the exponential growth, and move to the "top of the s-curve". I realize it will happen at some point. I don't pretend to know when. Do you really think it will occur within 10 years, which is what the author uses for his extrapolation in the article, and which would justify the parent commenter implying the back-of-the-envelope calculation is wrong (with a snide comm…

"I realize it will happen at some point. I don't pretend to know when."

Partial knowledge is possible. We can be quite comfortable ruling out "thousands" of years. It would require a total, utter rewrite of physics. While this can never be 100% ruled out, I do tend to think that when that's your last defense, you've gone too far. If people a thousand years from now look back and laugh at me for thinking that it's impossible to store multiple petabytes on a single hydrogen atom, I hope they'll at least have the courtesy to admit it was by far the most likely hypothesis given the quite substantial amount we know about particle physics right now.

Re: Cost of storing all human audio-visual experiences

#36

Post by Someone »

sharemywin wrote: post #11

assuming somekind of google glass attached to a giant world wide data storage. Could it be compressed? (which got me to thinking about compression and the larger the size of the data stored the more likely the chance of larger and larger streams being duplicate. How many parts of the image do I have to store of my desk. Also, could we limit it to interesting moments(how many times do I have to record me eating cheeri…

Whenever you have many recordings, the thing to do is building a 3D model of the world from it and then keep the camera movements for each camera, if you still want them.

I guess this or something similar to it will soon happen at large sports venues, say at the Super Bowl. It will start with the field, but if technology ges better and cheaper, they could include the audience, too.

Imagine buying an improved version of your memory: a fully immersive recording of your view of the game, with some improvements. For example, that guy that jumped up, obscuring your view of the winning touchdown? In the recording, he happens to sit a few inches to the left. View that a few times and wait a few decades, and you won't even remember that you didn't see that famous moment in sport.

And yes, that can be used for other purposes, too. Imagine that I appear in thousands of photos at some time and place while in reality, I was robbing a bank at the other end of the world.

Re: Cost of storing all human audio-visual experiences

#37

Post by mtrimpe »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #23
onebaddude wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>bzzzt and thanks for playing. There may be tens or hundreds or even thousands of years before that exponential curve looks like an s-curve, making his point more relevant that yours.

Well I've been pretty involved in storage for the last 10 years, 5 of them at Network Appliance and then later another 4 at Google dealing with their storage scale. And worked with both Seagate, Fujitsu, and to a lesser extent Hitachi as they have worked to increase the density of what can be reliably recalled. More interesting has been watching the struggle of thermal noise and the ability to push past areal densiti…

My bet is still on a break-through in write-once storage, which wouldn't just be useful for life logging but could also work wonders with a storage system like Datomic (with persistent/purely functional data structures.)

Re: Cost of storing all human audio-visual experiences

#38

Post by ChuckMcM »

mtrimpe wrote: post #37
ChuckMcM wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well I've been pretty involved in storage for the last 10 years, 5 of them at Network Appliance and then later another 4 at Google dealing with their storage scale. And worked with both Seagate, Fujitsu, and to a lesser extent Hitachi as they have worked to increase the density of what can be reliably recalled. More interesting has been watching the struggle of thermal noise and the ability to push past areal densiti…

My bet is still on a break-through in write-once storage, which wouldn't just be useful for life logging but could also work wonders with a storage system like Datomic (with persistent/purely functional data structures.)

I read an interesting paper in Science about backing up data to DNA as a future archive scenario. At the time I hadn't realized you could just store DNA by drying it out and putting it on an index card, I had visions of cryo vats of test tubes :-). Such a system would be a 'write once' sort of solution.

Re: Cost of storing all human audio-visual experiences

#39

Post by gknoy »

mistercow wrote: post #32

I know it may be a little tangential to the original point, but I reckon you could cut this down considerably if you had more accurate psychophysical models than we do. Humans are probably not actually processing anywhere near 1.25 mbps of input, and as far as our actual experience, we're discarding the vast majority of the information we even take in. Consider, for example, that if you could perfectly predict the ex…

If I were recording my life, I would not want to discard that, however -- I don't want to record merely what I actually saw/noticed, but rather what I would have seen or noticed if I had been looking elsewhere in my field of view.

Re: Cost of storing all human audio-visual experiences

#40

Post by mtrimpe »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #38
mtrimpe wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My bet is still on a break-through in write-once storage, which wouldn't just be useful for life logging but could also work wonders with a storage system like Datomic (with persistent/purely functional data structures.)

I read an interesting paper in Science about backing up data to DNA as a future archive scenario. At the time I hadn't realized you could just store DNA by drying it out and putting it on an index card, I had visions of cryo vats of test tubes :-). Such a system would be a 'write once' sort of solution.

Indeed. That's exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about, although from what I've heard access times for DNA are still a bit steep though ;)
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