Re: Forgetting
The doubling rate for total data generation appears to be faster than the doubling rate in total storage. So we're actually forgetting more, faster, than ever before.
Only under a specific and rather peculiar definition of "forgetting". Most of the data being "generated" is actually either low-entropy data that contains little additional information beyond what is stored, or it's the result of measuring signals that weren't being measured before (or calculations upon such measurements, which are equivalent for our purposes here). Discarding the former only means "forgetting" information at a rate much lower than the actual data rate; and the latter means "forgetting" things we wouldn't have known under other conditions, so there's no net increase in "forgetting" in a pragmatic sense.
Basically, the "forgetting more" claim is an abstract epistemological one. And as epistemological problems go, it's not one of the important ones.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
