I attended an interesting seminar from Professor Rodney Brooks, director of the Computer Science and AI Lab at MIT yesterday afternoon. He’s visiting Australia as a keynote speaker for the ICT Outlook Forum (which I attended last year in Canberra), and stopped by to spend the day at the CSIRO ICT Centre. The main gist of his talk was about exponentials, and how exponential patterns are the most influential indicators of future technology trends. Of course, the most well known of such trends is Moore’s Law, and predictably, Brooks hammered on this quite a bit. He did, however, also come up with some interesting statistics: There are approximately 10^16 ants in the world, and 3×10^16 grains of rice grown per year; in comparison, in 2003 we produced 10^18 silicon transistors – i.e. 100 transistors for ever ant in the world, and 33 for every grain of rice. This was his way of illustrating the significance of exponential growth, and I think it’s fair to say he made his point well.

Other potential exponentials Brooks identified (i.e. trends that look suspiciously like the beginning of exponential curves) included multi-core processors, such as the CELL processors. In the research labs, we’re already seeing 64 cores on a single chip – is this the beginning of a new exponential? If so, IMHO it will almost certainly change the way we develop software quite dramatically. I think it’s more than fair to say that at this point, most software is not designed with high-levels of parallelism in mind. Given this, and the different caching model in processors like CELL, there is certainly a requirement for further research and development into compilers that can both hide the complexity of multi-core processors from software developers and deal with a substantially different caching model to current processors. More interestingly, what kinds of things will be possible with the additional computing power of such chips? What can you do when you’re wrist-watch or your microwave is as powerful as a current-day supercomputer? Of course, this is nothing more than Moore’s law continued, but with greater parallelism perhaps substituting for raw computing power in a single CPU core.

The other big emerging exponential that Brooks seems fixated on is that of personal storage. The iPod is seemingly the poster child of this exponential for Brooks: he cites the fact that (US) $400 bought you a 10Gb iPod in 2003, a 20Gb iPod in 2004, and the equivalent of about a 40Gb iPod in 2005. If this trend continues, we’ll see 40 petabyte iPods within 20 years. Of course, this then raises the very obvious question of what the heck would we do with such storage capacity? It’s pretty much the analogue of what the heck can we do with 10 gigabit network connections that’s appealing to a wide range of people (sure, we can always think of some special cases that already require massive amounts of bandwidth or storage, but what about mass-market applications?).

Brooks posed the magnitude of such storage space in terms of books, photos and videos – By 2009, we’ll theoretically be able to walk around with 1 million books loaded (as text) on an iPod in our pocket. What the heck does this really mean? None of us can possibly read 1 million books in our lifetime: even if we live to 100, that makes about 30 books *per day*, every day of our life. So, what does it mean to be able to carry around the text of 1 million books in our pocket? Or the whole Library of Congress by about 2013 (for some reason, Americans are obsessed with this as an example). For starters, it seems to me to be almost at odds with the ‘always connected’ vision of the future. Who needs to be always connected if you can cache so much data? Sure, there will always be some data you want real-time access to, but it would seem that a lot of the existing web-style data could easily be stored and sync’ed at regular intervals on some massive personal storage device. Blogs, news, code, reference information even DNS data: all this stuff is cacheable. I guess the whole podcasting phenomenon is an example of this mode of interacting with data.

And what about beyond books? Well, Brooks’ calculations have it that we’ll be able to store something akin to every movie ever made (or close to it) on our portable personal storage device by about 2025. Again, it’s a trite example, since we could never hope to (or want to) watch so many bad movies. But again, it hammers home the question of what we can imagine using such space for. Will we walk around with the ID of every RFID tag ever assigned? What about a complete copy of the global DNS and a big chunk of the Googlzon search index? Funnily enough, it’ll be a very long time before we’re able to keep track of each silicon transistor (all 10^18 of them per year) on personal storage, but then I can’t say I can imagine anyone being overly disappointed about that! Maybe we’ll be sending multimedia or holographic messages to each other, and we’ll be able to keep a copy of everything we’ve ever communicated. What about a recording or transcription of everything we’ve ever done or said, image and video data of every place we’ve ever been, the face and voice of every person we’ve ever met? Well, that’s just starting to sound like Gordon Bell’s My Life Bits project. If indeed we do head down this path (which seems plausible though not inevitable) a more important question that arises is: how the heck to we deal with such an overload of data and information with our limited cognitive abilities? What kind of tools do we need to develop to help people wade through the swamp of every piece of information they’ve ever interacted with? Certainly, we’ll need to be able to tailor the information that is retrieved and the way it is presented according to the current context if people are to have any hope of using any of that mountain of data in their pocket. Unsurprisingly, that’s exactly where my team’s research is focussed.

Assuming we can make some progress on the retrieval and delivery of information from your personal data swamp, how can you imagine using personal, portable storage that is for most intents and purposes limitless?