just wait and see

While on the topic of change in our society I would like to point out another innovation that may cause great shifts in the way society works.

This is the exponential increase in the availability of digital images (Specifically film) and the information generated from the footage. The GoPro camera is what got me thinking about this.

Everyone these days is into photography, you can get a good camera relatively cheap and can take as many photo’s as you can possibly want. These inevitably end up on the internet. But all this was a result of the change from analogue to digital photography.

That was the first step.

Next we got cheap and small video camera’s (The GoPro). I know these are pretty popular at the moment (Heaps of my friends have them and I probably will soon), but once everyone starts using them all the time there will be a flood of footage on the internet of everything imaginable (Think about camera’s being used in a driver-less car; where-ever there is a car there will be recorded footage).

And the last step, computational methods designed for interpreting this wealth of data. Google became famous for computing textual data; once computing power and artificial intelligence develop sufficiently to interpret video then there will be a change on a level equal to that caused by Google’s search engine.

It is hard to imagine computing power becoming so powerful but once everything is being recorded a wealth of knowledge will arise from the computers interpreting this data.

It does give rise to some privacy concerns and issues about a “Nanny-state” but individual data will definitely be lost in the ocean of information. So no-body will really know what you are doing unless they really want to (Which the FBI can do now days anyway).

It’s hard to know whether this is good or bad.. Generation Y will probably struggle with  the change but the next generation will be all over it and calling us the obsolete generation.