Yes. Already massive amounts of data have been lost to the grind of technology forging 'forward'.
As we lose the information, we lose context, and without context 'facts' about the past begin to lose meaning to the present reader.
History, and the stories we have, is/are mankind's most important asset. Without the context of our past as a species, we lose the ability to navigate into the future effectively (without crossing into unfortunate places again, like world war, or slavery, etc.).
We have nothing but stories. Without those, we are nothing.
I think that raises an interesting problem - if you want to look back 1000 years the sources are scarce, and largely composed of the thoughts of the educated or the wealthy - people who could read and write and store these items.
500 years from now we're going to be faced with a totally different problem - if a user wants to learn about the year 2018 where do they start? Official documents will appear to be stored beside the thoughts of Kardashians besides trolls. It'll be very hard to parse through any information to get an actual sense of what was happening.
I mean, it's the same problem, using the primary sources to try and figure out the truth, but it'll be the opposite problem as we have now.
https://www.amazon.com/Glasshouse-Charles-Stross/dp/04410150... describes a different problem. In the 27th century the 21st century is considered a dark age not because anything particularly bad happened but just because data archival technology took a big step back. Early storage media were far more fragile than paper.
> Early storage media were far more fragile than paper.
That's true, but on a timeline of human history that's a pretty brief window and there was a lot of distrust in the medium at that time. We're going to have ~30 years where they have to rely on the old methodologies still, but the 20th century is a whole new ball game. They won't be able to retrieve circa 2000 floppy disks, no, but I feel like a lot of what's been around for the last decade is going to probably stick around.
I was hoping someone would reference that. One of my favorite Stross books, and a decade since reading it I frequently think back to it and worry about this mass of data we’re creating and obsoleting each year.
500 years from now we will likely have strong AI capable of rapidly processing the exabytes of data we produced in this day and age as a unit test for the self-modifying system updates.
That being said, on a timescale as long as 5 centuries, I don't think anyone can even begin to fathom in the slightest with any degree of confidence what anything will be like. I just hope the advances this century might make it a possibility I can exist long enough to see it myself.
It's a good point, but by then we'll have software to model the relationships between all of the known sources - New York Times Journalists, Reddit Trolls, etc., and filter out some of the craziness.
As have more and more information the context is loss anyway, we cant glean it from the noise, and even if we could most of us wouldnt care about it anyway, we are busy making our own context.
The fact that we cant access some old software is not a loss akin to forgetting our enslavement of others, and really we need no such memory, we enslave people today.
This comment in isolation? Maybe not. This whole conversation? It's certainly informative — from it, you can read a lot into the feelings about conservationism within this community. There's some form of value to be had from that.
Yes. A lot can be gained from reading any projects source code. This stuff is just as valuable today as it was when it was written. A programmer would learn a lot by reading this source code.
Well, this is both property and knowledge. I'd argue that the information content is more "real", since information is a real property of things in the universe. Property is a (useful) abstraction that humans have collectively agreed on, so that people don't get clubbed as often as in the past.
I don't know if "I don't have a copy of King's Quest 3 source code" counts as suffering.