companies like Facebook record every imaginable interaction their users have with the platform. they log each of your clicks and taps. they keep track of how long your gaze lingered on a post, whether you were on the same WiFi as that woman who might be your friend, which instagram reel you watched three times. for a single user this is quaint, but these practices are done on a planetary scale across all technology giants. they create petabytes of data per day and keep it for as long as the European regulators will let them. then they can have machine intelligence instrument it into useful knowledge for their cybernetic control systems that build newsfeeds, serve ads, decide how much compute to spend on you, which SKUs should be in which warehouses right before you want them. the Hive metastore bills run into the billions hospitals throw most of their data and telemetry out after each case, every single day. they record videos of vascular surgeries, endoscopies, discovering interesting physiologies. sometimes they're not recorded at all and most of them the time they delete them as soon as they’re done it's even worse for physiologic waveforms (ECG, EEG, arterial lines) which are essentially never recorded anywhere at all. milisecond scale views of patient's brains, vasculatures, hearts are generated and instantly destroyed. all of these time series of course predict people's hearts stopping, brains exploding, etc ahead of time. surgeons teleoperate robots, none of the micro-movements are recorded, policies never learned, never correlated into which outcomes were successful or not this would be unthinkable to most software people whose instinct is to record everything everywhere never mind the cloud costs, because we are sure there will be some use for it later and some model to be trained later. i don't have a prescription here per se my point is just that our civilization routinely hoards and treasures some of the silliest data in the world "i pressed like on the john pork reel" & destroys much of all the most important data it generates and limits what machines can learn

Look again at this dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. No longer pale, but absolutely glowing. My book Rad Future is out now! Let’s build the future we all want and deserve together 🩵