Monday, January 12, 2009

Recorded History

In the future, there will exist roughly as much information about each and every person's life as would exist in a standard memoir. This information will exist into perpetuity and be database searchable. So, if historians want to ask a specific question about what life was like, what people were thinking, etc., they can make a clever query and search the database. Studying the history of people (like us) who lived before this data exists will be like studying cave paintings and ancient scrolls. You have to make a story about people's lives based on the shreds of evidence that happen to have been written down. There's a big bias toward famous people and others (like me) who write everything down in spite of a lack of people interested in reading about them.

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