Digitisation is more than simply a process that applies to things like words, pictures, film and music – that these are now digital objects rather than physical ones is important, but not to be overstated. More vital is how digitisation has allowed progressively greater amounts of cognition and memory to be performed in 0s and 1s, with the price–performance ratio of anything that does so falling every year for decades. It is this which allows contemporary camera technology to land rockets and, increasingly, drive autonomous vehicles; it is what will provide robots with fine motor coordination and dexterity equivalent to that found in humans; it will permit the built environment to know more about us, in certain respects, than we know about ourselves. It will even allow us to edit DNA – the building blocks of life – to remove hereditary disease and sequence genomes at such low cost, and with such regularity, that we will cure ourselves of cancer before it reaches Stage 1.
Going Exponential: Ibn Khallikan to Kodak
To better understand how digitisation will shape our future, the story of how photography came to be about 0s and 1s, rather than plastic film, is a good place to start.
While photography went mainstream with the arrival of the first mass-produced camera, Kodak’s 1900 ‘Brownie ’, the world would have to wait almost a century before the same company released a digital successor. Released in 1991, the DCS 100 enjoyed a maximum resolution of 1.3 megapixels and originally cost \$13,000 (around \$23,000 today). Despite the stellar price tag restricting its availability to elite institutions and wealthy individuals, the shift to digital was decisive. With photography now an information good, it would exhibit trends analogous to the falling costs and improved price performance described by Moore’s Law in computing. As a result, pixels per dollar on commercial digital cameras doubled every year. Just as with computing, the exponential tendencies with digital imaging compounded significantly over time, meaning that the camera on the third generation iPad had a superior resolution by a factor of seven compared to its predecessor, the iPad 2. The significance of this extends beyond the convenience of having afordable consumer cameras. Cheap, ubiquitous cameras are a cornerstone technology in any move towards a society built on automation and data.
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chaos under heaven