Molson Hart

That's a great point. I feel like this is true in part because, at the time, we expected those photos to exist forever. Now that we do not, we save them differently. Good predictions are rare, but I've been using the cloud as a photo repository for years and expect to continue.

Yes, attitudes have changed too. This whole concept relies on some continuity of technologies and companies. E.g. if we use a different pict compression in the future will any company bother to migrate your old photos? Cloud itself is only ~10y old.

The potential life expectancy of a stone statue is 10k years? A paper photo 1-200? A JPEG x.y file on a HDD of a remote server 10? Etc.

Is this our next great startup idea? Instagram, for stone sculptures? I agree completely. I think you need to make the saving redundant, i.e. make sure you have a computer with sufficient HD space and make the cloud autosynch to your hard drive.

Google drive is supposed to do that in theory. Redundancy is super important. Another one is encoding. For example data ppl lament why "ancient, inefficient" CSV survives (text files basically). It is because you can still read it 20ys later with virtually all software.

I didn't think about csv's in that way - cool. Re: redundancy, Taleb's takedown of competitive advantage in international trade gave me much to think about. We have two lungs, two kidneys. Should we not have some duplication in industry?

You mean redundancy within a single company? A company has less means of autarky compared to a country or a person (more specialized by design). And society gets the duplication by competition/anti monopoly measures.

But good question. I'm not sure I understood it correctly though.