Who wants to live forever?
Who wants to live forever?
Immortality is a longtime dream of humankind. While as organisms we can only hope to be alive for a century (if something like coronavirus won’t make it shorter), we have already invented immortality — in digital dimension!
Digital revolution’s introduced digital immortality
People of ancient times were keen to save their work for the future generations but, effectively, failed. They leave to us few artifacts like petroglyphs or pyramids but in terms of information it’s nothing. We have no clue how those pyramids were built as there is no README file attached…
And after only a few thousand years we see those signs of disrepair and we know we lost the vast majority of evidence of the past ages already — because of entropy, which rules in the real world.
This is not the case in the world of digital, or virtual world. Digital forms of information are effectively immortal and entropy-resistant. No disrepair or even little change could be found in files dated 1970 — half a century ago — which are still in absolutely the same condition as when they were created.
Time simply makes no damage to digital assets, they live in the world without entropy with no ruthless rules like “what is born will die”. We can keep them fresh and complete effectively forever. As we trust archeology, this is the very first opportunity for humankind in all our history.
Digital immortality should make us rethink our ways
What does digital immortality mean for humankind? There are a couple of game changer considerations we should realize here.
1. If data can be stored forever, it can be used in the far future for wonderful things.
We all agree that a man of the 18th century won’t even imagine things we consider trivial in 2020. In the same manner we won’t predict how yet not known future technologies might be used for doing astonishing things with data, preserved from the past.
2. The risk of data loss grows alongside with the passage of time and reaches infinity.
In the world of constant (or even exponential) technologies development a harm of data loss will grow as time goes by. In the farthest future, when it might be possible even to recreate one’s personality using her personal data collected, the price of data loss reaches truly infinite value.
A stream of personal data grows rapidly
On the other hand, we never lived in times when collecting personal data is so easy, cheap and high quality. The following personal data could be collected by any modern human being automatically or with just minimal effort:
Thoughts and emotions: blogs, activity feeds in social networks, emails, chats history, reviews and ratings…
Visual information: mobile photo stream, mobile video stream, video surveillance data…
Physical information: health data from fitness trackers, records of voice communications…
Behavioral data: geo-locations, browsers history, payments and purchases, personal finances applications data, transport data from transport cards, locations data from access cards/digital keys…
If all this data is collected and organized, one can have quite a complete view on the life of an individual. Watching this data in its chronological order might feel like living someone else’s life. What if this someone is your grand-grand-grand-mother?
There is another trend going in parallel with the collected data growth. It’s constant improvement of techniques to store that data. Cost of storage falls all the time: 80TB(!) hard drives have been recently announced. Every new generation of data center facilities brings cheaper and larger storage to customers.
Reliability of storage reaches unbelievable: the cloud storage systems provide as high as 99.999999999% durability of data. As AWS informs their customers: “For example, if you store 10,000,000 objects with Amazon S3, you can on average expect to incur a loss of a single object once every 10,000 years.”
The world is not prepared yet
If you’ve agreed that the data collection is important and try to find a provider for its reliable storage, you will quickly discover that no service seems adequate to the task. In fact, they all focused on short-term and simply not ready to offer a product for a long run.
What is meant by ‘long run’ in this context? Well, it must be time, spanning at least two generations of the same family/group members. And how modern services handle this? Actually, quite poorly.
Accounts are fully dependent on the finance/availability/mental health of their owners. Data storage providers trust you are:
- Alive, active and menthally sane
- Your credit card/bank account is not expired, frozen or devastated
- You keep the same email address and phone number to prove account ownership
- You have good memory to remember your usernames/account ids/secret questions
Data retention beyond a person’s active life time is not guaranteed. There seems to be no legal basis for account existence beyond its owner’s life. No one simply cares about that!
Security measures rely on one’s consciousness and memory. One has to be capable of providing all required security credentials , which are tightly coupled with one’s personality. They are far from impersonal and can not be easily transferred to a trusted party or successor.
Prices are usually for monthly or annual subscription. If you ask how much it would be for a centurial subscription they most probably think you are crazy. And a millennial subscription would cost a fortune simply because they have no clue how to forecast and limit the expenses over such a vast period of time.
And even if a contract is signed, how one could trust that her account will still be on the list after so many generations of the company management, engineers and sysadmins, especially as the probability of mistakenly deleted user relentlessly grows over the years?
It looks like humankind’s attention is focused on short-term goals only. It is probably because technological progress is so rapid, that people don’t have time to have a look into the future, which is farther than the next year. We hope to change the mind of a reader by this article.
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This is the first article in a series, explaining why Retention.live project has been created in the first place. The next one will be about architecture challenges we faced while creating the service and practical advice of how to collect and store your priceless personal data.
