As I mentioned in my post a few weeks ago, I was super excited to visit the trailer of the future and talk about digital asset management. A lot of the topics they’re discussing (machines talking to machines, large-scale networks, objects that can think) are pretty much in my sweet spot (at least when it comes to thinking/writing, not necessarily always understanding).
One thing in particular stood out as super insightful, in talking about the amount of data they must collect (their systems track all the assets for Wal-Mart for instance), Joseph Salvo, who runs the department at the Global Research Center explained, “Most data you don’t need to remember, we just need the main signals.”
I love the idea that it’s not about remembering everything, but instead about knowing what to remember. Selective hearing, something my mother accused me of many times growing up, is actually incredibly valuable in this case as otherwise you could fill every hard drive in the world with all the tiny and generally useless details. In some ways I feel like this stands counter to what many people think about digital technology: That it offers a chance to record every micro-movement, whether it’s important or not. The reality of the situation, and I’ve heard this mentioned specifically in reference to electronic medical records many times, no matter how much our storage capacity grows worldwide we are just not going to be able to afford to store everything.
Anyway, with all of that out of the way, here’s a video of the team explaining what they’re up to inside that trailer of theirs:
Photo from 3dking on Flickr. Used under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 2.0 Generic license.
“I love the idea that it’s not about remembering everything, but instead about knowing what to remember.”
indeed this is a favorite topic of the Long Now Foundation – how to prevent a “Digital Dark Age” without recording every possible bit of data.
I myself have chewed on how to habitually purge data, so we can continually create space (http://showerinthedark.blogspot.com/2007/10/digital-recycling-game.html). we could have ritualistic inbox cleansing parties and somehow tag our files with expiration dates, but is there a way to automate this process? is there something about information that remains relevant for 1 day vs. 1 month vs. 1 year vs. an indefinite period of time that AI could sniff out and use to determine, in your words, what to remember? if there were, it would happily save space, money, and of course, energy.
[...] wrote about the value of computers learning to forget some things rather than just remembering [...]