* Data accumulation
Ever since Baron Frankenstein first turned on the juice to animate his creation we have all understood that sometimes, even when things are developed for the best possible reasons, they may turn on their masters. Ultimately, even the most innocuous things may eventually wind up being the death of us all.
By way of example, I offer the digital camera.
Digital cameras are made for folks like me. They provide instant gratification (no waiting for prints to arrive at the drug store), are very forgiving (all kinds of software is available to compensate for mistakes, and digital cameras even have a sort of “brute force editing capability” for those of us with lots of camera memory but who also come up short in the area of photographic skills (take as many pictures as you like, then throw away the shots you don’t like).
As a result, even camera-shy subjects often will let you get them into the picture once they understand they can exert a sort of editorial control by removing shots from the camera’s memory.
All of this seems very innocuous, perhaps even innocent. It is not, for two reasons.
The bad news is that digital cameras turn out to be an extension and further validation of what I immodestly call “Karp’s Second Law of Computing”, to wit:
Computers come and go,
Computer users come and go,
Even computer companies come and go.
But data accumulates.
When, after all, was the last time you cleansed your disk drive of useless files?
The much worse news is that it is also an indicator of something else that is much more important.
The significance of digital photography goes well beyond the change in the technology itself. I suggest that its real importance lies is the change it has effected in the way people interact with their cameras. Today, amateurs no longer have to be good photographers to get good pictures. All they have to do is take enough snapshots and eventually they get a good one. That, plus the fact that these days nothing gets thrown away, should be taken to be just the tip of a storage iceberg that is heading our way.
There probably is some guidance that can be applied to all revolutionary, efficient technologies: by being more efficient such technologies affect change not just in terms of quantity, but also in the fundamental approach people or organizations have in their way of doing things. If a technology is different enough and useful enough, it brings about changes in kind.
We see how an amateur photographer may now take a dozen pictures whereas in the days of film he would have taken his chance with just one. And all of those shots, the bad along with the good, may never get thrown away.
MRI scans, now much more detailed than was previously the case, can get applied in ways that weren’t possible beforehand. And because they will be more useful, more of them will be kept by more people for longer times so that we can extract maximum value from them. The data will indeed accumulate, and the use of the data will increase at a greater-than-linear rate.
And so forth in just about every area of technology.
The challenge for those of us in storage will be to manage this data tsunami efficiently, ensuring that data easily becomes information, and that information can always be rapidly accessed.
