Jim Baen's Universe

Singularity Watch

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Upload Your Life Now

Written by Mark L. Van Name

The first time you stand outside as a major storm is blowing in, you may not know how to interpret all the signs. From then on, however, all your senses will tell you what's coming. You'll see the clouds gather and the sky darken. You'll smell the crisp air. You'll feel the pressure changes wash invisibly over your body. You'll breathe deeply and taste the air. You'll know with a deep, animal certainty that forces beyond your control are gathering.

What you can never fathom until afterwards is exactly what those forces will end up doing and how the weather will play out, but you will know the phenomena signal a storm.

We live on the edge of a technology front the likes of which humanity has never seen. The rate of change in many of our key technologies is accelerating exponentially, and there's no end in sight. Computing, communications and networking, biological engineering, and nanotechnology, to name four of the most active forces, are all evolving at an ever-increasing rate—and they're all doing it at the same time.

Just as the astronomical singularity of a black hole is a place at which all the physical rules change, the singularity that may result from the continuing exponential rate of change of our technologies is a time at which all the rules of our lives may change, a point at which humans may transcend biology and non-human intelligences may surpass the computational power and the intelligence of our brains.

Note my use of the qualifying "may." My goal with this column is not to persuade you that a singularity is coming, nor is it to defend a particular belief system. (If you want a lengthy and compelling persuasion, read Ray Kurzweil's The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology.)

Instead, my primary aim is to show you some of the cool edges of the coming storm, bits of techno-change that are interesting—and, every so often, scary—regardless of whether you believe we're racing toward a singularity. Many of these developments also open the door to a wide array of issues and questions, and I want to encourage you to consider those issues and ponder those questions.

Some of the topics I'll cover, such as the main focus of this month's column, will be quite real, developments and technologies that exist right now, while others will be research or prototypes that are barely out of the lab. I'll also try to point out where the trends underlying these bleeding-edge techs may take us.

When I was a kid and read about Tom Swift, Jr.'s Triphibian Atomicar and his other inventions, I didn't realize I was a science-fiction reader; I didn't even know the term "science fiction." All I knew was that the world was a place where a smart, hard-working scientist might be able to do anything, create anything, be anything, and that universe of possibility was so insanely great that my young head almost hurt with the effort of containing my sense of wonder.

Today's rapid technology advances frequently give me the same belief and the same hit of coolness, wonder, and awe. Let's start with a fun one that's happening right now.

Putting it all online, 2006-style

Most of us already depend more heavily on technological adjuncts to our memory than we'd like to admit. Whether those helpers take the form of old tech—grocery lists and post-it notes coordinating family schedules spring to mind—or employ devices that are a bit more au courant—I rely daily on the schedule I keep on my PC and replicate on my PDA—they are integral to our lives. The digital ones, such as my schedule, literally are small parts of our lives that we've digitized and uploaded.

So, too, are any letters whose source files we keep online, as are digital photos, digital videos, email messages, and on and on. Our increasing reliance on information technologies has the side effect of causing us to upload ever-growing, though still small, portions of our lives.

Most sf stories that include human uploads deal with them in terms of entire consciousnesses being digitized (sometimes with destructive results for the original brain carrier, sometimes not), but as our common fledgling efforts indicate, we don't have to go anywhere near that far to put parts of our lives online.

The obvious question is, how far can you go right now?

If the MyLifeBits project is any indicator, the answer is, quite a ways.

MyLifeBits is an ongoing project involving Gordon Bell and others at Microsoft Research. Inspired in part by Vannevar Bush's 1945 article, "As We May Think," which described an electronic memory extender that Bush called the memex, the MyLifeBits team set out to put as much of Bell's life in digital form as possible. They focused initially on the simple task of digitizing his legacy materials, such as his past and current writings, photos, and CD collection.

Bell, for those unfamiliar with him, is one of the grand older men of computing. He joined the then-new and now vanished Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in 1960, worked on many projects there, including the early multiprocessor PDP6 system, and was the father of the very influential and highly successful VAX minicomputer architecture for DEC. He worked in multiple multiprocessor-computer companies, co-founded The Computer Museum, and ultimately joined Microsoft Research, where he still works today. (Disclosure: One company that Bell co-founded, Encore Computer Corp., purchased a company I co-owned. I met Bell but never really worked with him; my loss.)

When Bell and the MyLifeBits team began the project somewhere around 2000, they estimated that a terabyte of storage would be enough to hold the readings and writings of a typical 80-year human life. At the time, a terabyte was an imposing quantity of storage, though disk price and capacity trends were making it an increasingly more approachable figure even for those without IT departments.

Even now, if you don't follow disk storage a terabyte may sound like an expensive and large amount of storage, but it's not; many of us could afford it, and companies routinely fill many times that much online space. You can buy 300GB disks for a little over a hundred bucks, so hitting a raw terabyte of capacity will set you back less than $500. With that much storage, you'd almost certainly want some integrated redundancy, but the chassis and controllers necessary to provide those features aren't expensive; vendors sell pre-packaged terabyte storage devices in the $1.2K to $2K range. So, though it would obviously be a luxury, the storage itself is not an obstacle. (The PC sitting at the end of my desk, one I built and plan to make my primary system, has a terabyte of useful space in a disk array with built-in redundancy.)

The future of storage, of course, looks even more promising, and the improvements are, like those in all the key technologies I cited, arriving with exponentially increasing speed. In the short gap between the first and second complete drafts of this column, Seagate announced a 500GB disk drive that uses perpendicular recording, a technique that's been heading toward mass commercialization for some time. A Seagate spokesperson said that we can expect that capacity to grow by a factor of five over the next three to five years.

Meanwhile, memory vendors are exploring a variety of new technologies in their quest for ever faster, larger, and less volatile non-moving storage. Nantero, a start-up company targeting the potentially huge market for non-volatile RAM (NRAM) announced recently that it had created the basis of a 10G-bit NRAM storage array. This development is nowhere near a product, and there's no guarantee that their particular approach will work, but it's a good bet that some company will be creating multigigabyte NRAM modules within a decade.

The MyLifeBits team was definitely right to conclude that storage will not be a problem.

The challenge became filling that storage. Scanning all the paper materials and capturing all the already digital content, such as songs on CDs and existing digital photos, was a matter of labor and software. Bell had a decided advantage over most of us in these efforts, because he was working with a technical team that provided the labor, but any of us with either the time and expertise to do it ourselves or the money to pay someone else to handle it could take the same steps.

While putting existing content online, they also started capturing the content Bell was using and generating in his daily life. Photos were easy; Bell used digital cameras. Saving instant messages is no harder than turning on some straightforward software logging tools. You can record phone calls with digital recorders or, even better, by using VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) phone software on your PC and capturing the calls directly.

Bell and his team did it, and many of us could do it, too, were we so inclined.

Put all that together, and you end up with a large surrogate memory.—one that Bell has said he's come to depend on rather heavily.

As you might expect, the MyLifeBits team quickly realized that they could reasonably and inexpensively assemble a great deal more than a terabyte of storage, that demanding more storage, even a great deal more, was no problem, and that they had many more ideas for filling that electronic space. Thus, the MyLifeBits project evolved its mission to become one in which they would capture everything possible, not just existing paper, photo, and video content.

Today, they're dealing with an ever-expanding realm of digital materials. Bell is wearing a small camera under his hat and recording conversations and meetings as they happen. He's using a GPS that's constantly tracking and recording his location. A BodyBugg armband full of sensors is monitoring and capturing data about his body, including the number of calories he's burning throughout the day. Logging software working with the graphical user interface on his system is recording everything he's doing on the computers he uses.

Most of this is manageable for the rest of us. Even recording video full-time is possible, albeit with huge storage requirements, because a decent digital video camera costs less than a grand. Want to log the TV shows you watch? Set up a media center PC and record them. Movies you see at theaters are harder to copy,