They’re going to keep making more powerful hardware either way, since parallel processing capability supports graphics and AI just fine.

It’s not quite as simple as that. AI needs less precision than regular graphics, so chips developed with AI in mind do not necessarily translate into higher performance for other things.

In science/engineering, people want more—not less—precision. So we look for GPUs with capable 64-bit processing, while AI is driving the industry in the other direction, from 32 down to 16.

Something to be said for the wfh movement too.

I thought I read somewhere that when they were making one of the Toy Story movies, there was some catastrophic data loss that nearly tanked the whole production. But then one of the animators came back from maternity and said wait, I think I have most of it synced to my home server? And the next thing you know, John Lasseter himself is barrelling down the highway to her place and it turned out yeah, she did have it.

Well I guess I’m picturing DNA encoding like a RAID billion in terms of redundancy, so with some checksumming, you ought be able to sort out any mutations? But I’m no geneticist.

That’s why I back up my data on stone tablets in Cunieform.

Seriously though, if you wanted data to last for centuries, what would be your best bet? Would it be some sort of 3D-printed mechanical storage? At least plastics are generally not biodegradable, though they are photodegradable, so I guess you’d want to stick your archive in a dry cave somewhere?

Or what about this idea of encoding the data in the DNA of some microbe and cutting it loose? What could possibly go wrong?