After Digital - what next?

[Pano]

So as the endless debate about whether digital is better than analog or vice-versa rages on - I ask "What's next?"
Digital audio has been around since the 60s at least and has been a practical consumer format since the 80s. Digital photos, video and TV are more recent in the mainstream, but we are used to them now and are pretty happy with them. We like to think they are pretty cool.

" an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea." Douglas Adams

We tend to think digital is "it" even if analog looks and sounds better in the opinion of some folk. Digital is the modern world, and the modern world is digital. 0101011100, etc. How could we or our databases live without it? The Interweb runs on it, computers are full of it. But surely there will be something else along soon enough. What?

What's after digital? How will we store data and do calculations? DNA matrix? Carbon particles? Quantum storage devices? What will be the format, and what will the physical media be? And will we be nostalgic for bits and bytes when the new technology comes along? Will ones as zeros soon seem as quaint as the wire recorder and paper punch cards?

Thoughts?

[jerryo]

Hi panomaniac,
I think it is, at present, impossible to deduce what will follow digital technology. I'm not sure anything will for quite some time. Advances in computing power through quantum computers will be the next great technical inovation if the technology can be made to work reliably and cheaply. Where that will lead us who know's.
When the laser was first invented nobody could have anticipated the uses that would be found for them. I'm sure that will be the same with quantum computing. Whether the software for quantum computers will still be using 0's and 1's in there present form I doubt very much.

As far as audio is concerned, representing everthing as 0's and 1's is extremely useful and enables us to manipulate music in an extraordinary number of ways. If sampling rates were to be increased by several orders of magnitude then the waveform would be getting much closer "back" to the original analogue form. This just takes computer power and speed but will still use 0's an 1's

I could ask another question "what happens after class A,B,A/B,G,H,D" What technology will appear that gives us a "straight wire with gain" ?

[boconnor]

Digital will remain the underlying representation of music - it is the most fundamental way of representing information and can't be further reduced.

The medium for storing and transmitting will probably change. My guess is that 5-7 years from now there will not be CDs. Instead there will just be non moving storage devices that are filled with data via wireless or via PCs where the music has been downloaded from the net. Even music retail stores (if they exist) will just be wireless transmission sites for those with portable devices.

[Moddang]

Gsychergy technology

[rikvancoolwijk]

for computers I think the next thing will be analog, just like the brain processes analog data.

analog bits can store more info

[kavermei]

Originally Posted by boconnor

Digital will remain the underlying representation of music - it is the most fundamental way of representing information and can't be further reduced.

I disagree

Sound is the variation of air pressure, so the most fundamental way of representing it is as variations of air pressure (hmm ) or as some other magnitude proportional to it (e.g., deflection of a spiral groove in a flat polymer disk, magnetization of particles on a plastic tape carrier)

Kenneth

[Pano]

Yes it's very hard to predict - but why not fire up the imagination? Could electrical recording have been predicted in 1900? Probably not. But it was just around the corner. Then came magnetic and optical recording. All analog, of course!

But undoubtedly something will replace digital. Maybe it's too soon to know what. aren't there any budding technologies out there?

[EBM_dude]

If there's another world war, then there will be no digital anymore, just a few stones and rocks our descendants will use for, well, whatever they think of.
Nerves work somewhat digital while DNA uses 4 "states" (=different molecules) for storing information and is self correcting to a degree.

[Voegelchen]

Originally Posted by kavermei

... the most fundamental way of representing it is as variations of air pressure (hmm ) or as some other magnitude proportional to it (e.g., deflection of a spiral groove in a flat polymer disk, magnetization of particles on a plastic tape carrier)....

Kenneth

What's about the memristor it's a "new" electronic device... found approx 100 years after the other 3... There will be much space in the nano area to get things we can't imagine.... But somewhere technology will stop and break into another area... Computers can't run faster since 3 years (approx 3 GHz), so there's a frontier.. also in manufacturing, assembling, .......

Digital seems not to be the truth.. it's an amazing way to describe nature and simulate it , but maths and nature aren't digital... even if resolution is pushed (4-Bit -> 8 Bit ->.... 64 Bit -> ....), there's no complete description of nature or math... calculators can calculate very fast, but they must give up, if there is an equitation and I wanna have the generic solution, not a number

So future will be a better way of digital to describe nature or it will be (in what way ever) analog.

[marce]

Quantum computing with photons!
News analysis: Doing the quantum walk