The Decline of the Written Word

[Brenil]

I was listening to the news on the radio today at work and came across this story:

http://www.csmonitor.com/Books/chapt...int-publishing

It would seem that after 244 years of printing their trademark annual Encyclopedia series, that 2010 is the last year there will be a 'hard' printed version of the Encyclopedia Britannica. All the rest from here on out will be in digital form only.

This got me to thinking, is the written word in steady decline with the advent of widespread digital information? The answer I came to the conclusion on my own was an obvious, yes. From books, taxes, bills, magazines, newspapers, and a myriad of other forms of media and information everything that was once written or printed is now (or already has been) converted to digital copies. In other cases, some forms of media are obviously digital only with Encyclopedia Britannica only being the latest one to switch totally to digital information distribution.

Now, this was briefly touched on a few months ago by a similar thread found here:

http://forums.relicnews.com/showthre...highlight=book

But thinking in more specific terms, will civilization as a whole benefit from an increasingly digital form of written language? In the future, is a fully digital form of written language a good or bad thing for civilization? It seems increasingly likely that the days of printing and writing are on their steady way out the door and that the written word, as it is, will be the digital text at some point in the (possibly not-so-distant) future. A quote from the above linked article intrigues me; it reads:

“It’s a rite of passage in this new era,” Cauz told The New York Times. “Some people will feel sad about it and nostalgic about it. But we have a better tool now. The Web site is continuously updated, it’s much more expansive and it has multimedia.”

After roughly six thousand years of human civilization, this is the first time that writing is on its way to being exclusive, not to hard physical copies, but spaces of - relatively speaking - nothingness in terms of the physical world. While having an all digital world would make information easier to transmit, discover, document, store, and obtain; it would also lack any physical remnants or back-ups. As of right now, there are both digital and physical copies, but if physical forms are becoming archaic, aren't there dangers in having an all digital world that contains the very information of human civilization?

What are your thoughts on the increasing digitalization of, not just media, but all forms of human writing and information? Is the written word, one of the most - if not the most - important aspects of our civilization, on the way out in favor of the digital text?

[Starfisher]

It's all great as long as the power stays on.

I've been kicking a rough story idea around about archaeologists a thousand years from now trying to piece together what happened in the "blank spot" in history. Everything went digital for some time before a civilization-ending disaster wipes out the necessary support infrastructure. All they have are decayed solid state drives to work with, and since all the manuals were online, it's basically an impenetrable black box.

[Paladin]

Stop being bigoted. All text is text!

But being serious, there would be tons of optical media left, which hardly decay at all, and deciphering our file storage system would be a relatively trivial task... They're not complex. The only conceivable way it could present a problem would be if the actual language we use were to be significantly altered, such that there was no physical reference for our spoken/written language available.

If we spent 100 or even 500 years in a completely digital world, with no printed hardcopy being made, it would still be utterly child's play for anyone with even a modicum of cryptographic knowledge and a working knowledge of the English language to figure out our binary storage system, and piece together our character set from the raw data. I'd imagine it could be done by a competent investigator in about a week. Working by himself. Actually having multiple people on it wouldn't really even help, it's the sort of thing that would need one guy to do it all.

I'd think we'd need several thousand years to pass without hardcopy being made, so that human language would evolve sufficiently to make discovery of the character set difficult... And that would also assume that we actually changed our alphabet during that period, which seems sort of doubtful.

[Carl]

@Paladin: Optical media only lasts well if protected. Bury it under a few tons of soil and mud for a few centuries and it's going to have become completely ruined. I also advise you to once again look up shaksphere. The English language between his time and our has changed quite markedly. It's not impossible to understand of course, but it's not as simple as picking up any book from the shelf. I also doubt our file systems would be as simple to decode as your suggesting. There's no guarantee whatever file system they came up with would remotely resemble ours, and AFAIK the thing mostly likely to stump a cryptologist is something that bears absolutely no resemblance to anything he/she has ever seen before. It gives them no point of reference to start from or concept to extrapolate on.

As for the OP. I don’t think it’s going anywhere soon. There are still so many situations where hardcopy is useful. In particular, for security purposes their likely to remain around for quite a while. Files may not be easy to get rid of, but if you know how and have the access you can do it alone whilst appearing to do other work. A mountain of hard copy isn’t so easy to get rid of. I also don’t see the average joe feeling like going all computerized on reading material any time soon. The Encyclopedia Britannica is a reference material, that sort of thing will go all digital long before the rest by it’s very naure.

[Paladin]

Shakespeare is pre-linguistic standardization. There's a point (Basically the invention of dictionaries and the development of nearly universal grammatical and spelling standards) at which the change rate of our language slowed dramatically. The speed at which language changed before that point is exponentially faster than the rate of change after it. Shakespeare's work is well into the pre-standardization period, so yes, it's a bit convoluted and different for us now.

But the alphabet is the same. And it would require fundamental changes to our alphabet to make it difficult to decipher the data in our digital storage devices. Once you can relate the digital encoding to the language's alphabet, which is a trivial task if you already know that alphabet, you can reconstruct the documents perfectly. It might take some work to figure out archaic usages/spellings, or more properly, extrapolate correlations between the data you've extracted and the much older language in the hard copy materials you have to work from, but as long as the alphabet hasn't changed, that's not all that hard either.

But figuring out how to relate bytes to alpha characters is just a simple cypher, which any cryptologist worth his salt can solve in an hour or two. It's slightly complicated by the fact that you need to figure out the storage system itself, but honestly our storage methods are simple by design, and fairly logical.

[Octopus Rex]

English on the internet is standardized? News to me...

it would still be utterly child's play for anyone with even a modicum of cryptographic knowledge and a working knowledge of the English language to figure out our binary storage system

What like figuring out hieroglyphics was child's play? I think you're over simplifying and exaggerating I'm afraid (an HDD doesn't just contain letters in binary form, it contains shitloads of other data meaningless to humans, as well as thousands of characters) and underestimating how much language could change in a few thousand years. We could all be speaking some Anglo-Chinese-[New-country] hybrid for all we know, that's totally unrecognisable and uses completely different characters.

On topic: I think perhaps people felt the same when printing was invented. No-one will be able to write any more!! But still, it's an interesting question. I think the benefits to communication are just ridiculously awesome. For example just being able to run text through translators and stuff because it's digital, to transport it instantaneously or make it openly available from one global location.

It has its drawbacks, aye. Power is the obvious one. e-readers crack me up too as there's weird ownership/compatibility issues with formats and all that nonsense. However, I'd say that on the whole digitisation has made text freer and democratized it more - you no longer need a publishing warehouse (or even any serious amount of money) to make books or publish pamphlets, but then again I suppose we're beholden to the service providers (both ISPs and hosters and all that stuff we often overlook) so perhaps it's not as free as all that. Hmm.

The main danger is that it goes away, that wikipedia gets turned off etc. If you had the encyclopedia, it's not going any where. Sure, it can get lost/burnt, but then everyone else still has their copy, it's just you that lost yours.

[Paladin]

Nothing's stopping you from archiving Wikipedia to your local system. Hieroglyphics are a mixture of pictograms and ideograms, which are about 10000 times more complex a system to decipher than a phonetic alphabet. Our file systems are trivial to reverse engineer. Seriously, I know what's on hard drives, I know how they work, I know how the file tables and boot records and everything else associated with them work. And I'm telling you that it's not that complicated. Moreover, any system that was developed independently for data storage would be incredibly similar. Parallel evolution would be the rule for this stuff, there's really only so many ways it can be done, and only one or two optimal ways. If you look at existing file system specs, they're all fundamentally similar enough that if you know how one works, it would be a relatively trivial task to reverse engineer any of the others.

I'm not underestimating the rate of linguistic change. The chances of humanity having switched over to a character set that doesn't currently exist in a few thousand years is vanishingly small. There's no reason we ever would, and Chinese/Japanese style ideographic written languages are on the way out. Whatever develops will have a phonetic alphabet based on western or cyrillic characters or a mixture of the two. There's no conceivable reason that would ever change, it would be a pointless re-invention of the wheel. And whatever language the future archaeologists are using (Which actually would probably have experienced significant drift since they'd have been dealing with a tech level without widespread print or digital text with which to standardize their language(s), they will presumably have access to our written record from before the conversion to pure digital, from which alphabets could be extracted, and linguistic drift extrapolated. Again, pervasive textual sharing such as exists today and would exist with the networked digital systems we're postulating exponentially slows linguistic change. This is an established fact, and your frivolous comments about language not being standardized on the Internet are quite simply straw men.

Yes, English on the Internet is standardized. Despite the jargon and l33t and slang and lolspeak, if you analyze the level of standardization in spelling on the Internet today and compare it to the level of standardization in written materials from 700 years ago, the Internet wins. By far. The sort of spelling and grammatical errors and colloquial usages that grammar nazis rail about on the Internet today wouldn't have even caused even the most learned of scholars to bat an eyelash in 1400.

[Hand of Asur]

Aren't there dangers in having an all digital world that contains the very information of human civilization?

Montag selects a book to memorize, and becomes one of them.

I would be hedging for either/or. Edit: a key indicator will be how centralized data storage of general knowledge becomes and, whether or not it will become a monopoly.

[Moe]

But being serious, there would be tons of optical media left, which hardly decay at all,

I think you're wrong there, Pala. Current estimates don't seem to go beyond 100 years, which isn't very far into the future.

[Aesaar]

Optical media only lasts well if protected. Bury it under a few tons of soil and mud for a few centuries and it's going to have become completely ruined.

As opposed to paper media? Optical media (as it CD, DVD, etc) doesn't last especially long, but magnetic storage devices, specifically HDDs (but not tapes) do last quite a while. Certainly longer than paper does. I don't see us making an encyclopedia carved in stone, so I think HDDs or SSDs are our best bet should we choose to build long-term archives.

[Starblade]

While having an all digital world would make information easier to transmit, discover, document, store, and obtain; it would also lack any physical remnants or back-ups.

You're doing something terribly wrong if your database doesn't have backups.

[Brenil]

Backups, in the sense that while you can back them up with other digital devices, you can only back them up physically by printing them onto paper or a similar surface.

I think the danger of an all digital archive of humanity's cumulative knowledge is that it is vulnerable to calamities that don't affect other forms of documentation: i.e. paper and its ilk. Widespread blackouts of any duration, global warfare, natural disasters, or what have you, could all create widespread power outages that would endanger quickly (or easily) recovering information in the short term. In the long term, Starfisher's scenario isn't inconceivable due to if one were to lose access to humanity's archives, even for a few months or years, it could be devastating to civilization as a whole.

There is also the subject of who controls the access to digital media. While the internet may be more or less community property now, there's no promise that it will be in the future.

[LoCo]

Octopus Rex: There is a hell of a lot more to publishing than just the printing press. Just because people can now distribute whatever they want through the internet doesn't mean, in any way at all, that suddenly everyone can be a publisher.

Often Publishers can connect artists and writers. There is a shit ton of editing being done by publishers. There is translation work. There is advertising. There is polishing. Etc.

A good publisher does a lot more than a single person can do, does it all faster, and doesn't take up the writer's time doing all the 'publishing' stuff so the writer can actually ... you know... write.

You can see the need for publishers even on the internet. Look at web comics. Ryan Sohmer and Lar deSouza have basically become publishers for web comics. They provide hosting, advertising, website design, a brand name, etc.

The written word isn't in decline. It just needs to change it's business model or end up like the music industry.

[Vintage]

If media is digitalized and widespread throughout the internet it would essentially take the entire world losing power for the information to be lost. The chances of every location on the planet losing access to power is not very high, and I don't think it could ever truly happen to be honest. Paper is far more susceptible to calamities such as global warfare and natural disasters. It takes seconds to copy digital media and spread it throughout the globe. It takes considerably longer to do the same thing for paper, so if an earthquake destroys a library full of books it can potentially be far more devastating then if it takes out some servers, provided any information the servers had was backed up elsewhere which is ridiculously simple and easy to do.

[Starfisher]

Seriously, I know what's on hard drives, I know how they work, I know how the file tables and boot records and everything else associated with them work. And I'm telling you that it's not that complicated.

... Mm.

I also know a thing or two about file systems, and the last word I would use to describe this is trivial. Take a hard drive. Now, without knowing anything about SATA, or the correct voltage/current limit, make a cable which can both properly power it and retrieve data. If you don't know the protocol used to transfer data, you'd have to essentially brute force it to figure it out, because absent a manual or prior knowledge, there's nothing about an arbitrary bunch of pins that suggests a transfer protocol.

Sure, once you have a nice set of coherent bits you should be able to find a pattern. Getting that far? Good luck.

[Paladin]

Even a global blackout would do nothing... It's not like everything is store solely in RAM and needs constant power to be available guys, seriously.

[roflmao]

Monks in the 14th century:
Man, how do we know this paper stuff is going to last? It degrades so easily, and 700 years from now people won't be able to interpret the language we're writing in. Word of mouth is way more reliable.

[Brenil]

Even a global blackout would do nothing... It's not like everything is store solely in RAM and needs constant power to be available guys, seriously.

You assume the power comes back on.

What about the idea that any training manual or reference guide would also be digital as well? How would you train others in, well anything, that isn't known by an experienced teacher?

Even if none of that is the case, even local outages can play havoc in a world where everything is digital and therefore unavailable - for however length of time - to those afflicted.

Man, how do we know this paper stuff is going to last? It degrades so easily, and 700 years from now people won't be able to interpret the language we're writing in. Word of mouth is way more reliable.

Only thing wrong with such an analogy is that paper doesn't require a complex web of support systems in order to function. Only that it be weather-protected and the reader is literate.

[Starblade]

Nothing can withstand the test of time forever, Brenil, whether it's a book full of cat pictures or a hard drive with a database containing all your hilarious cat pictures (or a stone tablet with an etching of a cat).

And you've got much bigger problems if the power doesn't "come back on", namely that humanity has forgotten how to or is no longer capable of generating power.

[roflmao]

@Brenil: I think you missed the key point to my analogy. The argument being made is that complexity makes things inherently less reliable. While this line of reasoning makes a great deal of intuitive sense, I'm pointing out that it's not necessarily true. Yes, a solid state drive is a more complicated system than a book. But, then again, written language is a more complicated system than word of mouth. If you follow the premise to its logical conclusion, you end up with the assumption that word of mouth is superior to written language.

The only case in which an SSD system would be less reliable than books is if dysgenics caused everyone to become stupid, leaving humanity with president Camacho and Brawndo to rule us all. But, if that happens, as Starblade said, reading from SSD's is the least of humanity's concerns.

[JAL-18]

@Starblade: The obvious solution is to breed a line of linguistic, immortal cats and use them as our storage medium.

[RexOmniaLupus]

Digital media has a lot of advantages over printed media, and if those advantages are driving out paper copies then so be it. I personally still like to have physical and not electronic books to read for entertainment and such, but find digital copies a bit handier for reference works in many situations. It's not as though the process is irreversible - if we decide we need the advantages of paper again, we can start printing physical copies.

The only real problem I can see with digital is the infrastructure required. Failures in comptuers/e-readers needed to display the information, loss of power or internet connections needed to access non-local data can easily cause short-term outages in availability, whereas a book needs to be outright damaged or destroyed to lose functionality. However with proper care actual long-term data loss should not be a problem since copies can be created quicker and in greater numbers than physical versions, and distributed near-instantaneously around the world. Losing digital books should only happen if some great catastrophe wipes out digital storage on a worldwide scale, whereas over the centuries many works of literature have already been lost to various fires, neglect, or even intentional destruction, as it was not possible to either make or distribute copies to survive.

I think there will still be a place for books for some time to come, but increasing digitization doesn't seem likely to cause any major loss, either of information or of the accessibility thereof.

[TDATL]

Just because people can now distribute whatever they want through the internet doesn't mean, in any way at all, that suddenly everyone can be a publisher.

It is pretty darn close. That doesn't mean that people won't still pay other people to do their "publishing" for them. But it does mean that publishers loose their near stranglehold on starting producers.

Until recently if you wanted to sell something like a book or movie you needed either A) a whole lot of money to invest in the startup or B) a publisher that would do it for you (and likely end up with more control over your product than you.)

The internet allows prospective writers and such to practically go straight from producing to selling with next to no expense costs. Of course eventually you will likely want to hire a publishing agency of some sort to help but it is far better to be able to go into such dealings from a position of strength (having a proven product that is selling.)

The reduced financial investment needed to publish something will also mean a rise in publishing agency competition. Not only because people aren't forced to go through them anymore but because the reduced investment means more start-up publishing agencies and thus direct competition.

This is by no means the death of the written word. This is the birth of a new level of prosperity for the written word. The internet is to publishing as we know it what movable type was to the printing press.

Most of the doomspeak you hear about the internet is from people who are in control of the old system and only see this as cutting into their profits. Increased competition will almost always be viewed as horrible thing to people in positions of power.

[Carl]

@Starblade and Rex: that was starfichers point though. What if in some future we've bombed ourselves back into the medievil era before regaining technology. There's no garuntee computers in that future would remotly resemble the current. The current is only easy and logical to decode if it is in fact logical. The logic behind computer design of such a future has no garuntee of resembling our own in any way. @TDATL: No self publishing medium, not even the internet, offers anything like the degree of market exposhure a proper publisher offers. Fewer people will encounter your work and your unlikliy to be able to get as much money from them for your work.

[Vintage]

I don't think it is possible for us to bomb ourselves back to the stone age. Someplace somewhere in the world is going to have power and computers. Even in the most "optimistic" projections for us to kill ourselves, there's still going to be bunkers in the sides of mountains or underground somewhere that will have relatively untouched equipment. How many super secret bunkers are stocked with libraries? If a computer isn't surviving a world ending disaster what makes you think a book is?

[Misiok]

When the world is going to end and you want to stave off boredom, the first thing you're gonna take will be what? Expensive, heavy-ish computers that need power or books and candles? :P

[Paladin]

Um... Books and candles would be vastly heavier than a computer and solar cells. Even more vastly heavier than an e-reader and a solar phone charger

Do you have any idea how heavy a couple thousand books are, let alone the candles to read them by?

[Starblade]

The logic behind computer design of such a future has no garuntee of resembling our own in any way.

The same is true of language. Just try to read an old english text without translation.

Expensive, heavy-ish computers that need power or books and candles?

My solar charger weighs only a few ounces so if the bombs drop I'm going to strap that and my phone to my arm and try not to get killed by Lord Humongous who wants me to "just walk away" from all these funny cat pictures.

[Starfisher]

No, it's not the same as language.

First off, computers are mathematical constructs. It's unlikely that a future computer (re-developed post apocalypse) will be substantially different from one today in terms of its fundamental theory of operation. They'll have some concept of bits, some way of encoding/decoding them, and math, hopefully, won't change between now and then. So the information or language used to represent the information is either going to identical or similar to whatever they use in the future.

However, the actual hardware is not likely to be identical or even guaranteed to be similar. If I hand you a device, and you only know that it's supposed to store data, reverse engineering the i/o port in order to understand how to actually retrieve that data is not trivial. It's actually really fucking hard, especially if you're working with an ancient relic you don't want to destroy in the process of trying to understand it. There is no magic universal rule about how to modulate pins to send data, no universally decreed set of operations to ask for it, so you'd have to spend a lot of time and effort trying to figure that out.

A book, even one written in code, openly displays the information contained within to anyone with eyes. A flash drive is like a book that you can't look at unless you build a machine which does very specific things in very specific sequences - only then do you have a book analog that you can "look at". They are extremely different scenarios from the perspective of an archaeologist with no prior knowledge of the technology.

[korpisoturi]

Well, for an archaeologist from post-apocalyptic world it's going to be really fucking difficult to retrieve the data no matter what the storage media is like. In case of damaged optical media, the solution would probably involve some kind of microscope scan of the actual holes in it, with a computer analysis of the result afterwards.

There are theories that there might be salvageable information from the ancient library of Alexandria in form of burnt scrolls of papyrus in buried in cultural strata in he bottom of the sea. That kind of gives some idea what kind of challenges an archaeologist faces when dealing with lost data. They don't just find a book and read it.

[FriendlyFire]

I know the chances of it becoming the main architecture for computers are extremely small, but quantum computers share very little with their current "classical" counterparts, and that's just based off theoretical work. I wouldn't assume that the computers of tomorrow MUST have anything to do with the computers of today.

[Vintage]

@Starfisher,

Again, why would the computer need to be re-developed? It is almost impossible for us to do something that will destroy every single computer in the world. There's always going to be some stored somewhere, whether it's an underground nuclear fall out shelter or some untouched piece of land which happened to avoid being completely 100% decimated. I mean, if all the Earth's surface was entirely and completely ruined by this hypothetical apocalypse so that every single computer was destroyed and no power was available anywhere, where you do you think the survivors will be? In the super secret nuclear shelters playing video games on the computers over LAN. If there are still working computers why would we need to re-invent new ones?

[Starblade]

It's actually really fucking hard, especially if you're working with an ancient relic you don't want to destroy in the process of trying to understand it.

And translating from languages that don't share a root base (hell, ones that DO) that have been changed and altered over centuries and millenia isn't? Yes, computers are complex and have their own challenges. So are languages. So are thoughts and ideas and the concise display and transmission of them. And I meant "no, languages do not necessarily resemble each other", not "languages and computers are similar in complexity and challenge", if you were replying to me.

A book, even one written in code, openly displays the information contained within to anyone with eyes.

If it's written in code or ciphers you're not seeing any information displayed. That's the point.

[roflmao]

The sci fi person in me still hopes that some day we'll come up with some sort of bio-ssd, allowing us to expand our memory to a theoretically infinite amount. Just imagine being able to hook up your brain to a matrix-like machine and download knowledge to your extended brain. Yeah.

[SquidDNA]

A good method for archaeologically hardening data is to print it microscopically on glass and then block it in resin. Give every slide a strip that grabs the attention of anyone curious enough to examine with increasingly powerful optics (as messages will be printed smaller and smaller down the length of the strip) until you're at data-storage depth. Whatever you are storing with will presumably bleach if you leave it in the light for aeons, which is why you're not a moron and you'll store it in clay pots or something. A design problem will be, I suppose, choosing a material that will stay sufficiently transparent through the millenia, but amber manages so this is probably doable. If you can store your hoard of information in conditions that will prevent oxidation (keeping it dry is probably too much to ask) then you're probably ok.

[Starfisher]

And translating from languages that don't share a root base (hell, ones that DO) that have been changed and altered over centuries and millenia isn't? ...
If it's written in code or ciphers you're not seeing any information displayed. That's the point.

Er, no.

If you can open a book, you can see the information. You might not understand it or be able to decipher it, but the information is all right there on the page.

With a flash drive, the information cannot be viewed. It's not encoded, it's not indecipherable, it's not visible. You have to build a machine which can figure out how to interop with the device, which is not as simple as running a pattern analysis on a set of information. You have to do actual physical science and electrical engineering just to try to get to the point where you are with the book.

I work for a company that makes test and measurement equipment for electronic manufacturers and designers, so I get to see the process of designing stuff like this first hand. Let's take a grossly simplified example:

I am handed a random device with an n-pin interface. I am told it contains some information that we want to retrieve. I now have to do the following:

1) I have to figure out which pins are power and which are data, or if power and data are on the same pin.
2) I have to figure out what voltage the device requires - too much and I can destroy it, too little and the output is wrong/non-existent.
3) Once I have the device powered correctly, I now have to figure out what protocol it is using to transmit data using the pins. If it's recent USB, it means I have to reverse-engineer this.
4) After the many years I have spent figuring out USB 3.0 from a black box, I finally am capable of retrieving...

My enciphered book.

If I just had that same book - exact same book - on paper, those first four steps are not necessary.

Again, why would the computer need to be re-developed? It is almost impossible for us to do something that will destroy every single computer in the world. There's always going to be some stored somewhere, whether it's an underground nuclear fall out shelter or some untouched piece of land which happened to avoid being completely 100% decimated. I mean, if all the Earth's surface was entirely and completely ruined by this hypothetical apocalypse so that every single computer was destroyed and no power was available anywhere, where you do you think the survivors will be? In the super secret nuclear shelters playing video games on the computers over LAN. If there are still working computers why would we need to re-invent new ones?

My hypothetical is a thousand years in the future. Or may it two thousand, whatever. Imagine that in Rome they had a massive computer which ran everything and caused some holocaust which took the human race two thousand years to recover from. We're finally using computers again and someone makes an incredible find - a real Roman storage device! Now we want to see what's on it.

With a book or a scroll, you very, very carefully scan it and begin the process of translating it.

With a device of unknown configuration, you very, very carefully try to get it to power on to a state where you can figure out the protocol so you can get the data scanned so you can begin the process of translating it.

[SquidDNA]

I find the notion of writing a pictogram to explain enough electrical engineering to power on a computer delightful. You'd have to define constants in terms of something macroscopically demonstrable like "THE WATER PRESSURE AT THE BOTTOM OF THIS FILLED CYLINDER, ASSHOLES OF THE FUTURE -->"

[Starblade]

If you can open a book, you can see the information. You might not understand it or be able to decipher it, but the information is all right there on the page.

I think we're using different definitions of the word "information" if you're considering coded phrases you cannot decipher information.

For example you say "you have to build a machine which can figure out how to interop with the device, which is not as simple as running a pattern analysis on a set of information." That isn't a set of information, that's a set of data. It's information after you process it. Information is data arranged in a meaningful way.

"x 4 y 1" is not information. You can read it, you can see it. It is also meaningless without context or anything else, much like a code. Is it coordinates on a plane or part of a mathematical equation or maybe an ID? Who knows!

If I just had that same book - exact same book - on paper, those first four steps are not necessary.

No, you have an entirely different set of steps, which are no less mind numbing and tedious (assuming it hasn't been ruined by time).

You'd have to define constants in terms of something macroscopically demonstrable like "THE WATER PRESSURE AT THE BOTTOM OF THIS FILLED CYLINDER, ASSHOLES OF THE FUTURE -->"

"USERNAME: CAESAR PASSWORD: I II III IV V" is written on the back.

(I'm not arguing that one way is better than the other I'm arguing that both are going to decay eventually)

[roflmao]

Okay here is the solution to the problem!
1. Keep all data on SSDs.
2. Write a backup book that explains how the SSD's work in case people lose the knowledge on how to operate with them.

Problem fixed.

But, also, as Starblade said, without some sort of independent reference, language is completely indecipherable. Up to this day there are texts that haven't been deciphered and will probably never be deciphered until some equivalent to a Rosetta Stone is discovered.

[Paladin]

It would need to be more like five thousand years in the future. Time enough for us to transition completely to digital, for language to drift in a world of standardization, an apocalypse to happen, and 1-2000 years for humanity to pull themselves back up to a level at which reading digital data from our storage devices was even conceivable.

That said, making a device to interface with ours wouldn't be all that difficult. There really are only so many ways of storing digital data. It's almost inevitable that any civilization rising from the ashes of ours will go through the same magnetic/optical/solid state progression as we have. Any standard magnetic hard drives that somehow managed to survive would be fairly trivial to figure out. You wouldn't try to use their pinouts, you'd pull the platters and analyze them to figure out our storage method, and build a new drive to read them. Not a trivial undertaking, but I'd expect a competent research and development firm to be able to reverse engineer one in less than a year. SSDs are simply flash memory... Again, there's no reason to utilize the existing device instead of pulling the memory modules themselves and reverse engineering them, plunking them into your own device, and going through the stored data bit by bit to figure out the storage protocols. This would be more difficult than extracting data from a magnetic drive, but still doable... And yes, I'd expect any civilization rising from our ashes, developing computer systems wholly on their own without reference to ours, to have RAM and NAND very similar to ours. It's really the only logical design.

And the idea of them skipping our level and going straight to quantum computing is absurd, and probably not even remotely possible, since it would be impossible to develop quantum computers without computers

The only way in which I could see this scenario happening is if the archaeologists of the future are discovering our data storage devices at a tech level significantly below our current one. Say, somewhere in the turn of the century to WWII range.

[roflmao]

Take the text "askldhas alksdjasd." You can do all the linguistic analysis and pattern matching you want, but without an independent reference, it's literally impossible to decipher the meaning of this text. Without an independent reference, the two word phrase could almost be anything.

So, in any case, to crack a language, you need an independent reference. Language doesn't carry the information necessary to interpret it within itself.

So, really, language no different from an SSD. In order for archaeologists to crack an SSD, they might need an independent reference that explains how SSD's work, but that's not any different from what is required to crack language.

[Starfisher]

No, you have an entirely different set of steps, which are no less mind numbing and tedious (assuming it hasn't been ruined by time).

It's also entirely simpler. Interoperating with a device that requires exact steps to work is at a completely different level of effort than figuring out how to get information off a page of an old book.

Books don't respond to input. Books don't have protocols, don't require voltage and don't have complex standards for doing I/O. You just look at it, or look at it with electron microscopes in an atmosphere controlled chamber under low-light. But ultimately, you're just looking at it.

Not a trivial undertaking, but I'd expect a competent research and development firm to be able to reverse engineer one in less than a year.

Do you have anything at all you're basing this on or are you just randomly pulling numbers out of the air? NAND flash would decay significantly in the timescale we're talking about. So would a hard drive. In fact, my scenario probably isn't even possible since both media would have such significant corruption - possibly total - by the time they were found a thousand years from now that the exercise would be pointless. But even assuming you somehow had a perfectly preserved NAND flash, you couldn't just magically pull it apart and figure it out - taking it apart could easily disrupt the electrical and quantum effects the transistors rely on, especially if you didn't know what you were dealing with until you opened it up.

[Starblade]

Interoperating with a device that requires exact steps to work is at a completely different level of effort than figuring out how to get information off a page of an old book.

But ultimately, you're just looking at it.

Any other "fuck you"s you'd like to give linguists and archaeologists and everybody who researches anything similar?

So, really, language no different from an SSD.

Starfisher's right in that they're entirely different and require different things but dead wrong on how easy it is to translate or decipher dead languages.

[PetarB]

I have had a home computer since they were first invented. Every so often I go and look in the boxes they came in - for example my old Amstrad, or Mattel Aquarius. I sold my ZX81 way back when. The media is all ruined. The computers themselves occassionally boot up. Some certainly don't. And I have no way to extract the data from some of the information stores, and even if I could, why would I? We've moved on. Information is prone to rot, as Vernor Vinge might say.

Our language has changed dramatically in the past few decades. If a young western person now attempted to relate their social life to a person around 1950, they would have absolutely no idea what they were talking about. So many neologisms, new concepts, etc.

[SquidDNA]

Starblade, why are you being pointlessly tenacious?

Consider the two situations:

You have the full text of an ancient book in front of you and you're trying to understand it.

You have an ancient device POWERED AND INTERPRETED BY TRUCULENT WIZZARDS which may or may not contain an ancient book which is no more or less inscrutable than one which people might have written on paper instead.

Seriously, which situation requires more effort?

[Derivative]

Say a future archeologist stumbles across an SD card. That archeologist might spend some time cleaning it, then possibly build a replica. Something similar has happened; but unlike that, the replica wouldn't contain the information the original did, as its nearly impossible to see it (gears are more visible than nanoscale switches).
But say they could somehow build an exact replica that contained the data, or even recovered the original's data. It could be anything. Not just text, but hundreds of pictures, save files from various games, videos or music. How would you determine which is which when you have no idea what any of it is? The archeologist may come to the wrong conclusion about what it is, which has been done before.

[Starblade]

Seriously, which situation requires more effort?

I'm not disagreeing one is harder. I'm saying both are incredibly difficult and not particularly comparable and dismissing the other as "just looking at it" is a tremendous insult to anyone whose career it is to "just look at it". I'm also saying, which kicked this off, if we're at the point where "power doesn't come back", we're fucked no matter what.

Also I'm disappointed you didn't describe the book as full of Arcane Majicks.

Information is prone to rot, as Vernor Vinge might say.

Exactly.

[Paladin]

All you need to do is find a few plain text files on the drives, which will always exist because there's basically no way of storing plain text more efficiently, so there will always be some plain text files. Once you manage to find and correlate a block of ASCII text, you can use that block's location to reverse engineer the filesystem structure fairly trivially. Once you have that, you can now determine which blocks of data are individual files, recreate the directory tree, and start hacking away at what each individual file's structure is. Again, file format hacking is a fairly trivial level of hacking, assuming you're not dealing with an encrypted file.

Now, where you really and truly might run into an impenetrable wall, is if the denizens of the future-past society actually adopted widespread file encryption using strong algorithms. If every system on the planet was AES 256 encrypted, for instance (Which isn't even close to being the most unbreakable encryption available today), and there was a nuclear war... All systems were rebooted (Requiring re-entry of the password to access the data again) and everyone was actually using a passphrase with sufficient complexity... If all the people who knew those passwords died in the war, it would be almost completely impossible to retrieve that data the next day.

So widespread use of encryption for security could create the sort of scenario that we're discussing here, but it would be significantly worse, because the society trying to gain access to the old data would actually need to be significantly more technologically advanced than us to get at it. I mean, we have encryption available today that would require longer than the projected remaining lifespan of the Universe for us to brute force with the entire currently existing computing power of our entire civilization linked up as one giant cluster.

So if even a fast and relatively secure encryption system from 100 years from now were used on a routine basis, and a drive from that time period were to have been sent back through time to our current era, it would essentially be completely impossible for us to crack. Actually that would be a hilarious troll... Remind me to invent a time machine and toss an AES256 encrypted floppy disk back to 1979 some time... Err, anyway, yeah... Point is that the biggest threat to continuity of knowledge that I can imagine is a miraculous adoption of basic security practices by the general public

[FriendlyFire]

I'm not sure you realize, Paladin, but many current SSDs use built-in compression algorithms which make plaintext... not plaintext. There are many, many far more efficient ways of storing plain text than just as plain text. Heck, the docx format is a zip file containing XML.

Unless you know the specifications of the compression format used, good luck reading the data.

[Croaxleigh]

But say they could somehow build an exact replica that contained the data, or even recovered the original's data. It could be anything. Not just text, but hundreds of pictures, save files from various games, videos or music. How would you determine which is which when you have no idea what any of it is? The archeologist may come to the wrong conclusion about what it is, which has been done before.

"Oh my immortal datacat! These people from the past apparently couldn't afford clothes and spent all of their time delivering pizza and breeding. These historical photographs and video records prove it!"