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It's gonna be awesome to learn history in the next 100, 200 or 500 years. Video records for all the major and minor events, archived since the second half of 20
by t0mek 7y ago
It's gonna be awesome to learn history in the next 100, 200 or 500 years. Video records for all the major and minor events, archived since the second half of 20th century.
Although they may complain that it's "just a video", not a virtual reality or something. Also, we need to last that long.
- NateEag 7y agoNow that video forgery is easy [1], I think the mountain of video footage will make learning history in a few hundred years painful and difficult. How would you have any idea what happened and what didn't, from the 21st century on? Yes, historians worked without video or photography for centuries, but most people aren't as rigorous as a historian, and it's going to take a long time for our cultural norms to adjust to video being "default untrusted". Furthermore, the written word and eyewitness testimony aren't nearly as important in our culture as they used to be, precisely because of the "pics/video or it didn't happen" mindset. Again, that's what historians have relied on for centuries, but it's considered unacceptable now in favor of technology that's just become completely untrustable. There won't be trustable records for people studying our near-future. Finally, since we've all given up on "primitive" technology like dead trees, most information is stored digitally now. That's great for convenience but terrible for long-term archives [2]. Digital information will vanish if not tended actively and carefully, and historians have long relied on physical artifacts like letters that largely don't exist any more. Our culture is a nightmare for future historians. Edit: expanded on why it will be hard to study history in a few centuries 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepfake https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepfake 2: http://howicode.nateeag.com/data-preservation.html http://howicode.nateeag.com/data-preservation.html
- tcbawo 7y agoI am not a blockchain enthusiast but proof of authenticity is a use case that I've heard. It could be used to prove (for example), that a specific video existed in it's current form at a certain point in time.
- macawfish 7y agoThat doesn't mean the video is real though!
- acct1771 7y agoAt least you can track how the propaganda changes focus over time.
- macawfish 7y agoTrue we gotta look on the bright side
- tcbawo 7y agoI wouldn't be surprised if camera makers were embedding invisible watermarks in their images/videos already.
- NateEag 7y agoI would. The market has not demanded this yet, so why on earth would they waste the resources on building it? I might wish they did, but my experience of life says that product won't exist it until it looks profitable, and maybe not even then. That aside, watermarking video from cameras buys you nothing in terms of trust. Not all cameras will have the feature, so videos without it will not be known to be untrustworthy. For cameras that have it, the owners will be able to forge videos using them one way or another, so videos with watermarks will not be known trustworthy. Chains of trust are fundamentally about humans, and now that forging videos is trivial, we will never be able to safely assume in a vacuum that one is not forged. It's back to credible eyewitnesses, like we had to rely on for most of history.
- blablabla123 7y agoWith a low definition video that's probably challenging. Maybe it's possible to assert correct physics happening. To my knowledge at least 5-10 years ago Quantum Chromodynamics simulations were so prohibitively expensive that they were simulated on 20x20x20 ("pixel") grids. There aren't that many studies about (boring) Newtonian mechanics but even that provides its complexity challenges. Same holds probably true for most liquids.