An article, here, about the hidden cost of redundant, obsolete, and trivial (ROT) information in AI prompted the Badger to do some housekeeping of what’s stored on his personal computing devices. Accordingly, with a coffee in hand, the Badger began exploring some rarely used folders on a hard drive of one of his devices, one which doesn’t use ‘the cloud’. Unsurprisingly, this revealed an abundance of documents, scans, photographs, PowerPoint presentations, spreadsheets, notes, and other items with file dates that go back years. Opening some proved both entertaining and thought provoking. Some files triggered memories and reminders, but primarily the activity made the Badger realise that ROT information isn’t just a data management issue for organisations, it’s an issue for anyone with personal computing devices. There can be few of us who don’t have digital information that’s no longer useful, relevant, or necessary, because being a digital information hoarder has become normal!
As you will see here, digital storage has come a long way in the last 50 years. The Badger first used a personal computer in the mid-1980s when it had a 20MB hard-drive and a floppy disk! Since then, storage developments have been extraordinary. Today a mid-range smartphone has >100 gigabytes of storage, USB flash drives can hold hundreds of gigabytes, laptops and desktops with a terabyte or more are common-place, and, of course, there’s storage in the cloud. According to here, the world’s generating 4,661 terabytes of new data every second, most of it user-generated and unstructured, and growth worldwide is >20% per year. The amount of data created over the last 2 years alone accounts for >90% of data ever produced! Over the years we have perceived storage as cheap, but an inevitable truth is that storing more digital information always costs more than storing less, no matter how cheap it is. Given the growing data generation rate, we should all see ROT information as a growing problem especially in the realm of AI where information quality, currency, and relevance, rather than greater quantity, surely makes it smarter and more trustworthy.
The Badger suspects that a ‘storage is cheap’ mindset has reduced our personal disciplines regarding the management of the formation we produce. Many of us have become lazy digital information hoarders. Spurred on by this thought, the Badger ruthlessly cleansed his device. Today we live in a world where computing devices, digital storage, and information are abundant and at our fingertips. That, however, doesn’t mean we should ignore the fact that every item of information we store involves, in one way or another, the consumption of a number of the planet’s valuable resources. Recognising and addressing ROT information on our own devices thus plays a tiny part in reducing the demand on valuable resources. You don’t have ROT information, you might say. Look closer because it’s almost a certainty that you do…
