The total amount of information in the world is increasing. Simple enough concept to grasp, right? Obviously, we would then conclude that human knowledge is increasing as well. However, have you truly considered what the rate of increase really is on each of these and how the future will look concerning analytics and technology? I was watching a program not too long ago and the host said something that really caught my attention.
David enjoys writing about high technology and its potential to make life better for all who inhabit planet earth. Header Menu Skip to content. Home Subscribe Contact. Human Brain Indexing Will Consume Several Billion Petabytes In a recent lecture at Harvard University neuroscientist Jeff Lichtman, who is attempting to map the human brain, has calculated that several billion petabytes of data storage would be needed to index the entire human brain. In order to retain employees in service-based roles, salaries have risen in order to remain competitive with industrial sectors; this increase in pay has occurred despite minimal gains in productivity.
This may in part explain why the cost of education, healthcare and other services have risen faster than the general rate of inflation. The cost to keep the machine running also matters. Electrical efficiency measures the computational capacity per unit of energy, and it is also important with respect to the environmental impact that energy production has. The progress in this respect has been tremendous: researchers found that over the last six decades the energy demand for a fixed computational load halved every 18 months.
In this chart we see the computing efficiency of various processors over time. Here, computing efficiency is measured as the number of watts a measure of electrical power needed to carry out a million instructions per second Watts per MIPS. Looking at these two picturesit becomes immediately clear how fast technological progress increased the storage capacity.
Considering the time since the introduction of the IBM in , the growth rate of storage capacity has not been as constant as for the other measures discussed before. Early on, technological revolutions boosted the capacity stepwise and not linearly.
Yet for the time since , progress has been very steady and at an even higher rate than the increase of computer speed — as shown in the chart here. Exponentially advancing technological progress can not only be found in computing machines.
Cameras are a different example: for a given price consumers can buy cameras with more and more pixels. The number of pixels has again exponentially increased, as seen in the graph here. The exponential growth rates that we have observed over the last decades seem to promise more exciting technological advances in the future.
Many other types of technology have seen exponential growth rates beyond the ones discussed above. If this growth rate should remain constant, it leads to some mind-bending opportunities.
Notice: This is only a preliminary collection of relevant material The data and research currently presented here is a preliminary collection or relevant material. The exponential increase of the number of transistors on integrated circuits.
Click to open interactive version. This approach begins to make the unmanageable manageable. Another example that we experience daily is GPS navigation, where we are in constant search for a more perfect way to our destination. From Apple Maps to Waze to Google Maps, navigation apps are re-routing us around traffic and accidents that build up or occur down to the second.
We are all starting to trust that our navigation apps will find us a shorter, better, faster route because the best route yesterday is just another obsolete fact.
The bottom line is that data and technology are helping us navigate our journeys at almost every interaction in how we live, work, and play. Our experiences are already being informed by data, which is radically changing our experiences and behaviors. Arthur C. Here are the latest Insider stories. More Insider Sign Out.
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