The Future Impact of Openness

The European Commission has released a report [.pdf] with the rather unpromising title "Trends in connectivity technologies and their socio-economic impacts". Despite this, and a rather stodgy academic style, there are a number of interesting points made.

One of the best chapters is called "Projecting the future: Scenarios for tech trend development and impact assessment", which describe three possible future worlds: Borderless, Connecting and Scattered. What's interesting is that Connecting essentially describes a world where openness of all kinds is a major feature. The implications of these kinds of worlds are then examined in detail.

I wouldn't describe it as a gripping read, but there's a huge amount of detail that may be of interest to those pondering on what may be, especially the role of openness there.

Digital Mozart and Our Open Future

One of the key ideas that underpins this blog is that one day all knowledge will be freely available online. Open source is the means, and open content/open genomics/open data etc. will be the result.

Clearly, there is a long way to go, but it is important to keep things in perspective. Ten years ago, Wikipedia did not exist; today, it provides an unparalleled collection of knowledge, for all its faults. Looking just a little further back, say 15 years ago, the Web consisted of a few servers worldwide, and GNU was kernel-less - Linux had only just come into existence. We have gained much in those ten and fifteen years.

And now here's another straw in the wind, a sign from the future: the complete works of Mozart available online, free:

Starting on December 12, 2006 the ISM and the Packard Humanities Institute will make the complete musical texts of the NMA available to everyone for private, scholarly, and educational use as NMA Online. Free access will be provided on the Internet at http://dme.mozarteum.at/. The music pages are linked with the scans of the NMA’s critical reports. Comprehensive search capabilities allow users to easily find, study, and print any of Mozart’s works as PDF files. The NMA Online is the first extensive, up-to-date complete works edition that is available to everybody at no charge.

This is a wonderful resource, if rather slow because of the huge interest it has provoked. But that's a detail: this is the open future, and it's coming.

Driving Hard

Hard discs are the real engines of the computer revolution. More than rising processing speeds, it is constantly expanding hard disc capacity that has made most of the exciting recent developments possible.

This is most obvious in the case of Google, which now not only searches most of the Web, and stores its (presumably vast) index on cheap hard discs, but also offers a couple of Gbytes of storage to everyone who uses/will use its Gmail. Greatly increased storage has also driven the MP3 revolution. The cheap availability of Gigabytes of storage means that people can - and so do - store thousands of songs, and now routinely expect to have every song they want on tap, instantly.

Yet another milestone was reached recently, when even the Terabyte (=1,000 Gbytes) became a relatively cheap option. For most of us mere mortals, it is hard to grasp what this kind of storage will mean in practice. One person who has spent a lot of time thinking hard about such large-scale storage and what it means is Jim Gray, whom I had the pleasure of interviewing last year.

On his Web site (at Microsoft Research), he links to a fascinating paper by Michael Lesk that asks the question How much information is there in the world? (There is also a more up-to-date version available.) It is clear from the general estimates that we are fast approaching the day when it will be possible to have just about every piece of data (text, audio, video) that relates to us throughout our lives and to our immediate (and maybe not-so-immediate) world, all stored, indexed and cross-referenced on a hard disc somewhere.

Google and the other search engines already gives us a glimpse of this "Information At Your Fingertips" (now where did I hear that phrase before?), but such all-encompassing Exabytes (1,000,000 Terabytes) go well beyond this.

What is interesting is how intimately this scaling process is related to the opening up of data. In fact, this kind of super-scaling, which takes us to realms several orders of magnitude beyond even the largest proprietary holdings of information, only makes sense if data is freely available for cross-referencing (something that cannot happen if there are isolated bastions of information, each with its own gatekeeper).

Once again, technological developments that have been in train for decades are pushing us inexorably towards an open future - whatever the current information monopolists might want or do.