Search and Find
Service
Society's Genome - Genetic Diversity's Role in Digital Preservation
of: Nathan Thompson, Bob Cone, John Kranz
BookBaby, 2016
ISBN: 9780997564426 , 208 Pages
Format: ePUB
Copy protection: DRM
Chapter 2
The Evolution of Revolution
A buzz phrase these days, the Internet of Things (IoT) describes the rapid and ongoing integration of the physical world with computer-based systems through electronics, sensors, and network connectivity. For society as a whole, the IoT is revolutionizing manufacturing, transportation, healthcare systems, military operations, entertainment, and other major sectors of business and government.
For us as individuals, the IoT has allowed digital access to enter into, and even reshape, virtually every aspect of our lives. We have Internet access to our friends, family, cars, home appliances, fitness wristbands, TVs, medical devices, home heating and air, lights, locks, garage doors, and so on, and the breadth and depth of permeation is astounding. Consider the events of just one hour in the life of a typical American adult connected to the IoT. Let us call him “Steve.”
A Day in the Digital Life of Steve
• 4:50 a.m. The heating system turns up the house temperature from 65°F to 70°F.
• 5:00 a.m. The coffeemaker turns on.
• 5:15 a.m. The alarm clock goes off, waking Steve.
• 5:20 a.m. The radio begins playing “Chopin’s Spring Waltz.”
• 5:30 a.m. A Web application alarm prompts the toaster to toast two slices of bread.
• 5:32 a.m. After his shower, Steve steps onto the bathroom scale, which tells him his weight and body fat composition.
• 5:33 a.m. A pill bottle in the medicine cabinet chimes. Steve opens the door to see the lid of his blood-pressure medicine bottle glowing. He forgot to take his pill last night.
• 5:34 a.m. Steve speaks into his smartwatch, “Note to self: Download Mom’s blood-pressure meds history. She has been complaining about dizzy spells. Second note to self: Run a self-test on Mom’s slippers. They have not notified me if she has had trouble walking.” Steve’s smartwatch duly records both notes.
• 5:37 a.m. A loud buzzing is coming from the closet. It is Steve’s fitness wristband. He puts it on, not wanting to lose the calorie count he will get from going downstairs.
• 5:38 a.m. The toaster texts Steve: “The toast is done.”
• 5:40 a.m. Steve’s watch alerts him that his drive time on Route 1 will be tight. He grabs his toast, pours his coffee into his thermal-regulating mug, and heads out to work.
• 5:41 a.m. Sensing that the door has been unlocked and relocked, the heating system returns the house temperature to 65°F.
In under an hour, well before six a.m., Steve’s digital world has already exploded into millions of binary ones and zeroes, the language of digital information. Some context can help here. As those who deal with digital technology know, each one or zero is a bit, and eight bits make a byte. A kilobyte (KB) is made up of 1,024 bytes, 1,024 KB is a megabyte (MB), 1,024 MB equals a gigabyte (GB), and 1,024 GB equals a terabyte (TB). The progression continues with less common prefixes: petabytes (PB), exabytes (EB), and zettabytes (ZB). After that come yottabytes and other progressively larger data sizes (xenottabytes, shilentnobytes, and on and on). As Chapter 4 will detail, counting society’s genome in zettabytes will suffice for many years to come.
So what else will happen in Steve’s day? He will be notified every time his garage door opens and closes by strategically placed cameras that record, and text to him, the movements of anyone entering or leaving his home. And thanks to GPS tracking via cell phone, he will be notified whenever his daughter’s boyfriend comes within 30 feet of her. He will scan Facebook to learn what his children are thinking and doing, and may even see pictures of their activities. While checking on his kids, he will see several ads customized specifically to match his age, gender, and interests, all based on his Internet browsing history.
As an individual creator of data, Steve will also contribute to the worldwide generation of digital information in his own personal way. Each day on average, he will send 28 texts, receive 33 texts, log in to five separate digital accounts, take 14 photos, and link to more than 110 individual Internet-connected devices. Many of his transactions will generate only small amounts of data and have relatively modest storage requirements, but others will require much larger amounts of data. For example, creating and sharing 4K video requires terabytes. The Economist notes, “In raw form, a two-and-a-half-hour film shot in 4K at the usual 24 frames per second contains 216,000 frames. With each frame of the film containing 8.6 million pixels, and each pixel having 24 bits of color information, the resulting video file contains 5.6 terabytes of data.”1
How Big Is Big?
IDC estimates that by the year 2020, the digital world will have created 40 zettabytes of information. That is a little over five terabytes for every man, woman, and child who will be alive in 2020.2 If this information were put into books, 40 zettabytes’ worth would make up more than 2,900 stacks, each reaching 93 million miles—the distance to the sun.3
According to IDC, roughly 80 percent of this astounding amount of generated data will actually be stored. When predicting data growth and retention, it is easy to kick the can down the road by assuming that storage is a problem for the future. But the future is here. How much of the technology in Steve’s morning is futuristic and how much of it is available today? The answer may surprise you: All of it exists now. Yes, even the slippers. Developed by AT&T, which is working with Texas Instruments and a company called 24eight, Smart Slippers technology measures foot pressure, stride, and general mobility to yield data that can be used in many healthcare applications, including predicting and preventing falls, identifying changes in activity, and tracking progress in physical therapy.4
Welcome to the Digital Revolution. It is more than just a catchphrase to throw out at dinner parties when talking about your third-grader’s Scratch programming class. And it does not only apply to Fortune 500 companies. Organizations of every size and type are affected, as are individuals from virtually every walk of life. We are in this together. Data creation impacts every aspect of our personal and professional lives, defining our perceptions and expectations and transforming how we communicate with each other. Immersed as we are in this technology, however, it can be hard to grasp the true scope of the changes afoot. To understand their full implications, we must look back at the world as it was before the Digital Revolution began.
From Steam Engines to Search Engines
The Industrial Revolution, which unfolded between the mid-18th and mid-19th centuries, marked an important period of transition to new manufacturing processes. The events of this period have filled countless textbooks, but it is important to emphasize that it was about more than just the invention of new machines and production techniques. Just as important was the way in which industrialization transformed the fabric of broader society through its profound impact on working conditions, urbanization, living standards, and the social roles of women and children. Advances in technology brought incredible wealth to industrializing societies. For the first time in world history a true middle class emerged from poverty, forever altering the economic and social structures of our world.
The electrification of factories, the introduction of the assembly line, and the advent of mass production marked the second phase of the Industrial Revolution, also known as the Technological Revolution (c. 1860–1900), which launched society into a new economy, one driven by some 70 subsequent years of ongoing and rapid technological changes. After this revolution began, however, several decades passed before there was once again a measurable increase in overall productivity. From the point of view of standard growth models, this delay is puzzling. However, historians hypothesize that it was due to the slow diffusion of new technologies among manufacturing plants and to the sluggish pace of ongoing training in these plants after new technologies were adopted. The reluctance of manufacturers to abandon their accumulated expertise in old technologies—embodied in the design of existing plants—slowed the diffusion of new technologies for decades.5
In contrast, the metaphoric Digital Revolution differs from its industrial counterpart in one especially fundamental way—sheer speed. This modern-day revolution is not being driven by manufacturers and their factories, which have traditionally set the pace, but by individuals themselves, many of whom are under...
All prices incl. VAT