What better way to start the year with a forecast for the coming 365 days +? Finally being able to catch up with my blog reader, I undoubtedly came across George Siemens’ post on the “Top 10 forecasts for the future” which were issued by the World Future Society.

All the mentioned trends can have an earth shattering influence, but the one that is most likely the most invasive for each person – at least in my opinion – is the first one: “Everything you say and do will be recorded by 2030.”

Though it is not said in which way all this information will be used, analyzed or even just stored and archived, this will have a major impact on our lives. Would we eventually get used to it as we are often not aware of surveillance cameras in public places? Would we care? Would we be more guarded? What about privacy? Would we be able to have an “Oops” button (see video below) to delete anything that should not be recorded?

Deb Roy from MIT can give a glimpse at the magnitude of data that can be produced though the envisioned nano devices need to use different technologies in order to avoid such huge storage needs as the Human Speechome Project required.


Deb Roy on the Human Speechome Project

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2 thoughts on “In the year 2030

  1. I think that there is a conceptual and theoretical problem with this opinion “Everything you say and do will be recorded by 2030.” – As far as I have understood the main issues in artificial intelligence and in the philosophy of mind, it is virtually impossible to automatically record EVERYTHING somebody does or says, since you would have to define what it is that you want to record… If it’s to be stored in a “verbal” or symbolic way, like “then she turned right, then she said ‘hello’, etc.”, then it will inevitably not be EVERYTHING… since discrete descriptions of reality are always abstractions of a continuum that we cannot grasp by these means of representing the world and every action in this world… it’s always a question of level-of-description, or would you consider that every movement of every atom should be recorded, too? No? well, then somebody could claim that you don’t record EVERYthing! and so on… this is of course a never-ending story… and there would be very much debate about what counts as “something somebody does”, and how to describe and record these “actions” or “handlungen” or “activities”… I think the idea itself of being able to simply record everything even a single person says or does is an illusion due to the fact that we as humans have these already interpretative cognitive mechanism in our mind that make us think we perceive the world as it is, while this is not true… and we only “see” our interpretation or construction of the world and this “nice story” is full of discrete “objects”, like pencils, cups, and the like, while these are continuous phenomena in the physical world, without any clear cut boundaries at even sub-molecular levels…

    So I’m not at all afraid of being “fully recordable”… 🙂

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