On the left, what you needed to store 1GB of data in 1988. On the right, a tiny 1GB SD drive that's already at least three generations old:

So there you have it: over the course of 20 years, 1GB of storage has gone from the size of a Yaris' engine to something smaller than a postage stamp. And hell, a 1GB flash card is actually pretty small compared to what else is out there. Pretty amazing stuff.

There's a rhetorical and political problem underneath the undeniably breathtaking jolt that is this picture: how to explain, anticipate, or - if one is so inclined - resist technological change. For some people that's perhaps the central ethical problem of contemporary technological culture. For others, resistance is a non-issue insisted upon by busybodies who are - for largely ideological reasons - unwilling to acclimate themselves to change and progress. The tension between Burkean frames of rejection and acceptance is probably constitutive of what it means to use symbols - but the sheer material weight of technological progress is certainly not innocent in influencing people to default to one frame rather than another.

On the other hand, we really like having 2gb of expandable space in our Treo. And our camera. And our hackneyed card reader / jump drive. And we're pretty sure that the giant motor thing on the table wouldn't fit in any of those peripherals.

References:
* 20 years of technological progress summed up in one picture [Sci Fi Tech]

Previously:
* Bacteria Seem To Be Doing A Lot Of Thinking These Days
* A Peircean Checklist For Conscious Artificial Intelligence
* The Psychoanalytic Pushback Against Philosophy Of Consciousness