What I can see us ending up with is huge amounts of write-only data; essentially data logging on a massive level. There are precedents – just how much of that CCTV “footage” is ever looked at? It will be technically feasible (in storage terms) to record almost every aspect of everybody’s lives at full video level. Even if no government makes it compulsory (and I can imagine them doing it to “offenders”), some company somewhere will produce devices to do this for the mass market. Given the way that people seem prepared to give up privacy on the Internet, then anything could happen. Some Twitter addicts seems prepared to let the world know of what they are up to on an almost minute-by-minute basis. Logging their lives electronically would be a natural move. All this virtually unlimited storage could be welcoming us into somebody else’s goldfish bowl.

It is in the nature of technology that it changes human behaviour in ways that we cannot easily forecast.

Remember the holodeck? Turns out some Stanford researchers have figured out a way to use holographics to store data. This is a quantum leap, and while actual commercial usage is many years away, but this is the kind of innovation that makes Silicon Va…