And they think that the digitization and digital storage (as well as regular updating) will be cheaper than that? I don't. I asked ChatGPT 3.5 for some rough e

And they think that the digitization and digital storage (as well as regular updating) will be cheaper than that? I don't. I asked ChatGPT 3.5 for some rough estimates on the storage costs. Ideally, we would be using archival quality scans (~75MB per page of a will) and a more or less random distribution of will length resulted in an estimate of ~700 million pages for the archived wills, or 50,000 PB. This number would need to increase each year, but this would be the baseline for the reported 100M wills. If we assume $20/TB/month for archival quality distributed storage, the cost for the baseline storage is about $12B annually, and that's just for the storage. Indexing, retrieval, etc. adds up to 50% more per year on top of the cost to digitize and develop such a system in the first place. So we’re talking ~$18B or ~£14B annually. Depending on storage density and overall reliability, 25,000 – 50,000 racks would be required without data redundancy, so the $20/TB/month baseline cost or $30/TB/month for redundancy, indexing, and retrieval does not sound too far out of line. Are we really saying that the physical storage of wills is costing ~£20B annually? (It could be, but the likely highest cost as always is personnel. On the other hand, digital storage requires more climate control than document storage, which aside from humidity control, can mostly be kept underground without temperature controls.) The chat, for consideration. The costs could be constrained by not using archival quality scans, but that would be the purposeful destruction of history — which, given that we're talking about the tories, isn’t that surprising, really. https://chat.openai.com/share/edb569c0-30f9-45ea-8d9f-745631ef4533 https://chat.openai.com/share/edb569c0-30f9-45ea-8d9f-745631...