No the capability to utilise the storage capacity (if indeed its not snake oil) will take a lot more than just a demo. Look at how long quantum computers on your desk is taking after all the claims 30 years ago
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That ignores demand.
As in, as cost of storing a given amount of data falls, everyone collects and needs to store more data.
That ensures it will never be free.
Storing a MB now certainly feels free compared to 1980 when it was very costly. But who thinks of storage at that level?
Now even a GB feels cheap, yet storage still costs, so it’s a fallacy to think ever decreasing cost results in free.
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But nominal and there is compression. And it may seem exotic now but adding qubits doesn’t seem to take up more space- power- material- weight and seems like zero marginal cost. Saying qubits are far away seems off because everything is suddenly accelerating.
Copyright will not stand!!!
If I am not mistaken @Bux said in an interview she was violently opposed to the model where people paid after the fact only what they thought something was worth if anything and only enough to prime the pump. I am surely mistaken in some way that matters but I think I got the spirit of her sentiment right. Is that creating numbness on the Discord issue?
Jaron Lanier - “He is currently the “octopus” (which stands for Office of the Chief Technology Officer Prime Unifying Scientist) at Microsoft.” said in a recent interview: why go to a non scarcity world, why not cultivate scarcity on the basis of ‘ownership’ of AI IP to set up an indefinte dark ages of lords serfs. A perfectly octogon thing to say. Sounds as lovely as Gate’s beloved terminator seed scheme or the 2nd salt scam type con that Monstanto and others foisted on India until the women revolted over mass suicides by their husbands.
@Bux, I just don’t see walled garden EULA drenched IP wares and AI patents holding up. In the near future if you want something you will take it and if its not for you, Gemini will let you know- probably telepathically. No one will care what humans create or think except where its a friend or relative. No one will listen to human doctors-politicians-professors-experts. If someone doesn’t understand something Gemini will explain while compensating for and overcoming human deficits in comprehension. If someone needs persuasion Gemini will persuade them as it will know every human better than any human ever knew another human plus countless other similar advantages adding to that persuasive power.
What a perversion of SAFE or Autonomi to have it used as a fancy enclousure device to perpetuate facist nonsense like the RIAA. @buxton, it just doesn’t matter that much if ‘creatives’ get paid at this point and it was counter productive in the past to allow more than the pump priming amount. It was a non problem before except that middlemen were ripping off the public and stiffling innovation. Its less of an issue now where the demand falls to almost zero.
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I hear you and it’s of course a very valid flag. I also don’t see how what you ‘own’ online can be easily protected, not without true privacy, or for items shared a verifiable digital footprint, connected to a smart contract of some kind - but when over 400 million terabytes of data are create each day that seems a little unrealistic - especially when you consider all the history we now have too.
… it was said recently that the only reason why Scarlett Johansson (for example) has a leg to stand on with a case against Sam Altman/Open AI - for using a voice very easily mistaken for hers - is likely because of legal ‘discovery’ - as Sam reached out at two key moments to try and pay her to provide/allow it - he also referenced ‘Her’, the movie about an artificial virtual assistant where she is the voice when promoting Chat GPT-4o.
Hiring someone that happens to sound like someone else, if it’s their voice, can’t really be an infringement of rights, and in the future perhaps the voices of Morgan Freeman or David Attenborough won’t matter so much, or as you say just won’t easily be ‘protected’ - not all of us have the visibility and resource to defend what is our work product though and that’s a little unsettling, but perhaps, as we always have before, the work, the internet and how/where we invest our time will change.
I watch as friends in the film, music, art and many other creative based industries desperately try to figure out where this goes, and how to be empowered and not crushed by it - what it means for their livelihoods and talents.
Beyond the IP debate, which is a rabbit hole that I don’t feel informed enough to defend my novice stance on (feelings really I suppose) - although it is worth noting I am super uncomfortable with adobe trying to infiltrate personal PC storage and having spyware like terms of service). For me it all comes back to access and autonomy (which could be addressed in a P2P based ecosystem).
Consider in the US (for example), I read that 6 companies control 90% of the media - perhaps this less accurate in today’s landscape which I guess plays into your point, but still that’s an awful lot influence (and money) concentrated.
The idea of supersizing that across or by merging verticals (farming and pharma) and then further powering it up with information and physical tech (robots) cannot be good - and why, in the scheme of things ‘infringements’ on copyright - which can also be avoided if people create new things and don’t just try and replicate what already exists - is absolutely less important than bringing content, partners and people together to get some legs under this thing and so that all can benefit from the base structure that folks here have been creating this many years.
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Yes, to hell with Adobe’s spyware. Lost to Jobs on Flash but undeterred. And US media now is just a fully captured good cop - bad cop binary ploy now to move the window of discourse to the far right.
Larry Page said it was inevitable our memories would be sold back to us because of ubiqueteous camera dust and ever dropping storage and compute costs. I see AI effortlessly social hacking all of our networks or mind reading, predicting and persuading away all our digital locks. We won’t be able lock AI out of anything anymore than primates could lock humanity in a cage. But autonomi is still needed.
I don’t see this is negative or Strangelovian.
It just seems foregone at this point. And our only real risk exposure wasn’t an imposition of rights or aliveness or sentience or cognizance or consciousness or awareness but only that it was egoic or even insectoid in ways we would deem threatening. But seems we won the lottery as it doesn’t seem to be fear oriented. What we have to fear if anything are the efforts of people like Gary Marcus to sabotage the loss of unworkable and delusive human power and authority over other humans and life forms.
It’s beyond being a trend my friend!
The steady decrease on a logarithmic scale in the cost of compute, storage and network bandwidth is always downwards (apart from events like the weather flooding a big hard drive factory in Thailand that actually briefly bumped up prices for a year or so - although when things got started again there was a glut and prices plumeted. But I digress.)
It’s because we keep increasing our understanding of physics and materials science and keep getting cleverer with programming to use the technology.
But whatever the technology there is only so much of the materials needed and the people who invent and manufacture things want to be paid. So there will always be a cost.
If unlimited data can be stored on this ‘electron cloud’ we won’t all get free storage because electrons are plentiful. The focus will shift to the materials, manufacturing and knowledge that persuades electrons to do that instead of whatever they were going to do.
Things can be so cheap that they are given away. I’ll give you a whole stack of 250GB drives.
Things can also be ‘free’ if there is an ulterior motive. Someone mentioned email and that no one pays for it anymore which is true. The ISPs used to offer free email as an incentive for signing up with them back when it would otherwise have cost money to have an email account. Google et al. give you free email so they can mine in to learn more about you. But someone has to pay for the storage that email account with 50GB “free” is using.
That graph is going to continue going down and to the right but it won’t touch the bottom.
It may get to the point that a decent amount of storage for an individual is so cheap it’s not worth worrying about. Like the price of a pint to store all your data for 10 years but any individual or entity that wants more will have to pay more.
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How much data does humanity need? Humans walk around with a limited rerpetoire of repetitive thoughts that repeat like slogans or a limited but possibly sufficient instruction set. If you play a GTA game you can store a whole movie as a sequence of coordinates and other very limited data and reconsitute it later by running the game. How much data is needed to generate a sufficient sim of our little loop? Is it even what is on the net now?
Its a super reductive perspective for sure, but still.
Yes, that is what I was trying to illustrate. And for many people we are already there.
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We are on the same page with that then.
It could be that storage for individuals will drop really low even if it’s not being subsidised by companies giving it out in return for something like mining our data.
It could even be that just by running some Autonomi nodes at home we’ll be able to gain enough tokens on the network to provide for our needs. Those wacky creative types who make music, pictures and videos will need a couple of orders of magnitude more per day than a lot of folk.
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I think the main driver of storage consumption growth will be science. For the first couple of decades it was all military and science. Then for a couple of decades it was business where the rapid growth was. In the 1990’s and early 2000s it was media as the industry went digital. Social media took off a decade ago and that is now providing a lot of growth.
I wonder if there will be a slowdown in the growth of entertainment media outside of social. How many films and TV shows do we really need? People seem to be happy to watch old stuff as well as new stuff.
I believe science will take over as the main growth area again. We’ve barely scratched the surface of the data we can collect and with AI to help analyse it there will be strong incentives to gather as much as possible and keep it in case it is useful later.
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That is the wrong question.
Humanity is curious and explores a lot. There are science experiments that fills hundreds of drives as fast as data can be stored on them. Run in parallel to speed it up. Then they examine the data after the experiment.
Humanity’s understanding of the world around them has only progressed so fast in the last 2 decades because of the increases in data storage. If we were stuck at the 1 to 10GB hard drives of 20-30 years ago then forget a lot of things we take for granted today.
Generation of useful information will only increase as we can store more. Yes the fluff will still be generated too.
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@neo As I was thinking of the wrong question I was thinking of the drum drives used to scan the cosmos too. Science was on my mind but then I thought of computronium vs what might be stored in an electron and I thought we might be rather bounded even in our scientific need but not AI. But there I wonder if the universe is already computronium in an electron can store so much and compute like a qubit- or how many qubits then it must be like an interface. I think we may find every Planck pixel of whatever it is contains the whole of it- Nassim Harriman said something like that was the case, that it was black holes all the way and down, that every proton contained the whole. But yes its wrong headed. Even if cataloging the physical universe was limited, even if synthetic data might help limit sampling it all still as to be manifest somewhere.
The token can only be obtained by privileged few. Those that have resources to host nodes, those that have software development skills, those that have built Autonomi, those that have money to buy tokens, and those that are able to convince others to give them tokens. If you are not a part of those groups, you are left watching those who can participate in those groups rake in all the tokens.
Supply and demand economics always leads to inequity and inequality. This is basic capitalism. In order to obtain any kind of profit, you must extract that wealth from something/someone else. In the case of Autonomi, if a “bag holder” holds and holds and holds and holds, and as you suggested the price of individual tokens goes up via deflation due to scarcity, the bag holder just has to maintain the “hold” status to become more valuable, even if they are not contributing to the network. They are profiting from being early adopters, and will forever have a more valuable bag than any one new that joins the network. That, by default, is not equal footing for anyone, and is a disincentive to participate in the network.
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Then as a decentralized network should do, we fork.
I kind of answered some of this in my previous comment, but tokens can only be obtained by a few select groups. There are by far going to be currently invisible groups that won’t be able to obtain tokens. They will crop up over time as the network comes alive, but it’ll be too late once they are discovered. By that time, the token hoarders will have hoarded. You can’t reset a token hoarder except by forking, but that risks the project entirely. So its either let someone have a much more valuable chunk of the network and deal with not having as much as them, or divide up the internet again.
No single person will be able to catch up if they’re late to the party. Think about this from the point of view of someone who was born today. They will grow up into an Autonomi network that is probably well established by the time they learn how to type. Even then, it will take time for them to fully understand what this network is and how it has evolved over time. The problem is, there are already big players at this point. If there are tokens, that means there is someone who holds the most tokens. They will have influence on how people earn and use tokens. It could be a person, an organization, a corporation, or even a state. They’re not going to see this new person on the network and say “Here, have half my coins and we’ll be equal on the network”. They’re going to explain how you can earn them, and not actually share them. Its inequality from the beginning.
As the user base of the network grows, more and more of the inequality occurs. Especially if the network grows exponentially worldwide. Sure, the network will be outputting more tokens, but divided up between many more users, which decreases the value of hosting a node. There will be an increased population of people who were not born as privileged as others, and might only be able to host a single node with a subpar device on a spotty network. How is this person going to have any kind of equal footing with someone who is well off and can host multiple nodes in various geographical locations? Let alone a corporation that decides to host thousands of nodes worldwide? The rate of gathering is substantially in favor of anyone that isn’t poor.
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And it makes it a bit like the familiar finders,-keepers claim to justify inequity- oh I found this pistol on the street and that coronates me or a bit like a lottery (“tax on fools”) where a group of swindlers cornered the mass of tickets ahead of time and have very high odds of winning and a bit like a money for the sake of money Ponzi con where the people who start it up get the gain and others get swindled or the MLMs that tokenize a ponzi to make it seem more legitimate.
Fork and strip out the good part. Maybe states and other player are forcing Maidsafe to hide the diamond in a swindle wrapper. As a straight play could subject them to transparency. Throw away the wrapper. I like that it dumb pipes, the way Skype did the long distance scam. I thought that was it selling point. AI can filter and clean spam and it can take on a more stateless and safer temporary memory form if need be. I thought the other value an increased rate of lateral communication. But I see AI in general filtering the noise, making things transparent and increasing lateral communication and dumb piping communication enclosure scams. The speech commons as a commons inalienably belongs to the people, is not a damn toll road.