The World in 2030

252 The World in 2030
However, by 2030, we too will be part of ‘Big Brother’s’
surveillance team. We ourselves will be videoing our
surroundings every moment we are outside of our homes.
This is not because we will have become so self-absorbed
that we want to watch endless playbacks or ourselves taking
the kids to school, or meeting business clients; it will be for
the purposes of personal and family security. XVI
The cost of digital data storage has collapsed in recent
years and the amount of memory storage available has grown
in accordance with the law of accelerating, exponential
technology development. By 2030 computer storage systems
will offer so much storage space, and cost so little, that the
price of capturing everything will be almost too small to
measure.
As a result we will use small cameras and microphones
woven into our clothes (or worn as lapel pins, broaches
or jewellery) to constantly record all of our surroundings,
sending back the images wirelessly to a remote storage
system via the ‘super-web, or pervasive ‘internet of the air’,
a network of networks that will be available as freely, if
not quite as cheaply, as oxygen. We will only ever review
this date-and-time-stamped imagery if there is an incident
(and every potential criminal will know that every citizen
is constantly capturing and transmitting events in their
immediate surroundings).
XVI
The UK is the most advanced surveillance society in the world with 4.2 million CCTV cameras deployed
and British police and parking wardens are already videoing everything on a continuous basis
during shifts of duty. Other law enforcement agencies around the world will follow suit.