Book Review: Abundance – WSJ.com: “If every image made and every word written from the earliest stirring of civilization to the year 2003 were converted to digital information, the total would come to five exabytes. An exabyte is one quintillion bytes, or one billion gigabytes—or just think of it as the number one followed by 18 zeros. That’s a lot of digital data, but it’s nothing compared with what happened from 2003 through 2010: We created five exabytes of digital information every two days. Get ready for what’s coming: By next year, we’ll be producing five exabytes every 10 minutes. “
February 22, 2012
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I disagree with the term “produce” in some of these uses. When you take a photograph, you don’t produce any data; you are simply recording data which was already present in the physical world.
Comment by greg — February 22, 2012 @ 2:05 pm
Good point, Greg. And the resolution of the photo could arbitrarily increase the amount of storage w/o being a meaningful representation of the data in any given system.
Still, I don’t think that photos represent all of the increase, so I think something is going on. Reminds me of Kurzweil’s assertion that in the future most of our new knowledge will come from sifting all the data and finding previously unknown connections and correlations.
Comment by jasony — February 22, 2012 @ 2:08 pm
True. A lot of data “produced” comes from some processing/resifting/deriving/etc of previous data. But its not obvious to me what is “new” data vs what is recording existing data. If you were smart enough, you could predict anything about the future state of the universe from the current state of the universe plus all the rules of how every particle in the universe behaves. But calling that derivative data is a stretch.
Regardless, 5 exabytes is a lot of data, no matter where it came from or what it is. Even producing 5 exabytes of random bits would be incredible.
Comment by greg — February 22, 2012 @ 2:17 pm
A few off the top of my head places that are producing a lot of data:
the LCH (holy cow amounts of data per second)
Google
emails/texts
Hard to imagine 5 exabytes in 10 minutes, though. Maybe a lot of this is behind-the-scenes stuff that’s machine created?
Comment by jasony — February 22, 2012 @ 2:26 pm