In a fascinating column in MIT Technology Review, Rodney Brooks, director of the AI lab at MIT, makes some startling predictions on the implications of exponentially expanding digital storage. “Any stable system can become unstable when even one component experiences exponential growth,” he writes.

Like Moore’s Law, storage capacities are currently doubling every year. At this rate, 20 years from now, we’ll have 20 petabytes (1 petabyte = 1 million gigabytes) in our pocket. That, Brooks notes, is enough capacity to store every movie ever made in human history.

Among other near and far-term figures Brooks offers:

  • Today’s iPod could store the text of 20,000 Books
  • An iPod 10 years from now could store the text of 20 million books, exceeding the entire collection of Harvard University’s Library.
  • An iPod 17 years from now could store text plus all images for all the books in the Library of Congress.

To make this exponential pocketable data usable—a knowledge of the world in your pocket—we’ll need to refine technologies for viewing (digital displays), searching, sorting, and saving. But more importantly, from my perspective, we’ll need new cognitive technologies.

Once the world of human knowledge is in your pocket, how do you decide what and when to transfer to your brain? And how do you transform information into insight and insight into action?

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