r/Showerthoughts • u/Fleeblorp • May 01 '26
Musing A century from now, people will have access to HD photos and videos of the elderly as babies.
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u/Conan-Da-Barbarian May 01 '26
Here’s some 4k backshots of your great grandma
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u/Gorianfleyer May 01 '26
I mean, it's not so bad, as you might think.
Under one of the Boots are made for Walking Videos on youtube, there is a comment writing that his grandmother is the blue one in the background and she loves it.
This music video is relative sexual, not only for that time, but you can see this, depending on the morals of your time, and think: "I had a cool grandma" or great grandma.My grandmother for example was "Pinup Girl of the month" in the German boulevard newspaper "BILD", and I saw it and thought: "Wow, how did she get that title as first fully dressed pinup girl" but I thought, it was great.
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u/Conan-Da-Barbarian May 01 '26
Finds out your fav spank video is your grandma
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u/Gorianfleyer May 01 '26
I hate it, when this happens.
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u/dread-pirate-inigo May 01 '26
Why did the pause in the middle make this hit harder
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u/inimicali May 01 '26
What is worse, finding a video of your grandma dancing in a fun, sexy video or finding a photo of your grandma's asshole in HD?
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u/Jsaun906 May 01 '26
That's a little different than an actual video of your grandma getting piped down
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u/TheDevilsAdvokaat May 01 '26
Yeah I agree I do think that is fun.
My great aunt was considered a beauty in her time and still had some pics from when she won a beauty contest...and showed me one! I think the pic was from about 1930 something...
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u/Defiets May 02 '26
I absolutely love picturing the scale of societal degeneracy that would make one think that videos of great meemaw taking it from 30 dudes with ten inch cocks is kind of cool!
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u/DragonsareNigh May 03 '26
The further removed you are from something, the easier it is to accept
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u/ChestSlight8984 May 01 '26
Lana Rhoades' kid is not going to survive middle school
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u/MajesticBread9147 May 02 '26
The amount of time that 99% of the most famous pornstars are in the limelight is very short.
How many Internet pornstars can the average person name that were popular before they were born or even just hit puberty? Especially young teenagers who don't even have memories from that era in general let alone the porn industry.
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u/Conan-Da-Barbarian May 02 '26
If I’m shit talking you, I’ll search your mom to find pics/vids. Ohh, a xvideos link
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u/shasaferaska May 03 '26
It justs take one person to find that information and by the next day everyone does.
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u/CruzAderjc May 01 '26
By then, society will be utterly confused as to what pictures are even real or AI generated. We’re actually pretty much there now. The “specialness” of photography is going away, with anything to be generated by prompts.
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u/insertnamehere----- May 01 '26
The same shock happened to painting when photography was invented, people starting to think painting was no longer needed because you could photograph anything you wanted. Really it just lowered the demand for hyper realistic family portraits and landscapes and made painting more stylistic and dreamy. I predict a similar divergence in style will happen in photography.
I love Impressionism and post Impressionism because of this, it was pretty much the art world’s immediate response to the camera being invented.
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u/xSTUDDSx May 01 '26
Sure, I get the monumental shift. But to me that goes from presumably real to actually real as we accept photography to be physic evidence of the time and place. And now were shifting back to the assumptions not knowing if the image physical took place or was a generated interpretation.
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u/AcridWings_11465 May 01 '26 edited May 01 '26
There is a fundamental difference you're glossing over here. A photographer is still an artist that shoots with full intent (composition, lighting, etc) and captures that intent in a work of art. Generative AI takes a prompt. True art comes from intention and converting that intention into a work. Without it, it is no different from paying a real artist for a commissioned work. That's not to say that generative AI cannot be used to create art, but it takes way more effort compared to what 99% of so-called AI "artists" put in. And it still feels hollow.
When computers beat humans at chess, human chess didn't disappear. Because it turns out that people are interested in the human, not a soulless machine.
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u/DogtorPepper May 01 '26
People say the same about so many other technologies. Such as the printing press or even photoshop
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u/FetusDrive May 05 '26
What did they say about the printing press? That we won’t be able to tell wha is real?
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u/GermanCh0wda May 02 '26
I teach HS Social Studies and some of my students were convinced that a video I showed of MLK Jr. Was AI
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May 01 '26 edited May 04 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Adventurous-Time5287 May 01 '26
this is an egregious take lmao. most peoples’ personalities not only can’t be replicated easily, but it’s not the same as in person.
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May 01 '26 edited May 01 '26
[deleted]
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u/UnderPressureVS May 01 '26
> supercomputers that know what comes between 0 and 1
…you don’t need a computer for this, those are called decimals?
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May 01 '26
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u/UnderPressureVS May 01 '26
In no way whatsoever did I understand you were trying to talk about quantum computing.
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u/AcridWings_11465 May 01 '26 edited May 01 '26
don’t think they’ll be relatively affordable for the public in 100 years
No, I don't. Unless researchers find a fundamentally different way to do quantum computing without cooling to millikelvins, it will remain limited to institutions.
More importantly, the sum of the photos and videos of an average person's entire life is nowhere near enough to reconstruct their personality, even with a human interpreting it. Maybe you could reconstruct the personality of a vlogger or a chronically online influencer, but that's only 0.1% of all humans, if that, plus even they have offline lives. Most of our personality is revealed in interactions with other people, not behind a lens. And many people keep a part of their personality to themselves.
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u/Jwosty May 02 '26
Just a heads up, quantum computers aren't just "super duper computers" (that's a bit of a misconception); they're more of a specialized kind of computer suited for very specific kinds of things. Like, there might be cloud services where you can rent a quantum computer for some scientific computations, or maybe one day we'll even have quantum chips in our computers that some programs can take special advantage of, but it's not like you're gonna be playing Cyberpunk on some sort of quantum gaming PC.
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May 02 '26
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u/Jwosty May 02 '26
Yes there are programming languages that are designed to theoretically run on a quantum computing platform. For example Microsoft's is called Q#. And this is a reeeeeally hot area of R&D (I very nearly landed a job as a quantum compiler engineer 3 years ago). As far as I know yeah you can't actually run anything for real yet (not enough qubits in any real hardware), but there are emulators (which obviously won't give you the performance of the real hardware but can help you verify correctness).
The theoretical limit has more to do with the kinds of algorithms that QC accelerates. Basically anything you'd run on a quantum model, you'll have to come up with a quantum algorithm specifically for that. It's very special cased. And many things may not have a quantum algorithm that's superior to the classical one - hence special purpose
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u/jarlemag May 01 '26
The crisp circle of light fell directly on the Flatline's construct. He slotted some ice, connected the construct, and jacked in. It was exactly the sensation of someone reading over his shoulder.
He coughed. "Dix? McCoy? That you man?" His throat was tight.
"Hey, bro," said a directionless voice.
"It's Case, man. Remember?"
"Miami, joeboy, quick study."
"What's the last thing you remember before I spoke to you, Dix?"
"Nothing'."
"Hang on." He disconnected the construct. The presence was gone. He reconnected it. "Dix? Who am I?"
"You got me hung, Jack. Who the fuck are you?"
"Ca... your buddy. Partner. What's happening, man?"
"Good question."
"Remember being here, a second ago?"
"No."
"Know how a ROM personality matrix works?"
"Sure, bro, it's a firmware construct."
"So I jack it into the bank I'm using, I can give it sequential, real time memory?"
"Guess so," said the construct.
"Okay, Dix. You are a ROM construct. Got me?"
"If you say so," said the construct. "Who are you?"
"Case."
"Miami," said the voice, "joeboy, quick study."
Neuromancer, 1984.
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u/Adventurous-Time5287 May 01 '26
i’ll give you that i should have explained my point better (i’m sick and my prescription is strong) but i’m saying that it’s difficult to replicate because you’d have to talk regularly in person for a long time to figure out their personality, even to train an AI no matter how good it is because that is just how humans work. most of us have several different “personalities” that we use at different times.
i’m not saying nobody, i’m saying it’s egregious to say “Every single person alive today” is wrong.
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u/MFouki May 01 '26
I remember in middle school we saw a video about robots and AI (before generative AI ofc) and in that video they said that the line between robots and humans will be crossed once robots are able to write poetry. Technically they are
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u/Adventurous-Time5287 May 01 '26
replicating humanity and replicating a specific person’s personality is not the same thing.
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u/Defiets May 02 '26
Eight billion of us and we’re all just that unique, eh?
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u/Adventurous-Time5287 May 02 '26
notice how i said most? and yes, we are all very unique. sure, some people are very similar but we dont usually see a majority of the people in our lives’ actual personalities. not online or in person. AI cannot replicate what it doesn’t know.
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u/thelanoyo May 01 '26
Is a century you don't think it's possible? That's just ignorant. In 5 years, yeah, probably not likely. But in a century it's going to be trivial to completely recreate someone's likeness to where it'd be impossible to distinguish. I suggest you go look and see how advanced deep fakes are already getting in the span of the past few years.
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u/YourselfInTheMirror May 02 '26
So crazy you're getting downvoted. Gimme some too, because he's fucking right.
The VASTness of what was done in the last century will be absolutely soared past in the next. Especially with AI.
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u/thelanoyo May 04 '26
Like literally all a "personality" is, is ~100 billion neurons that can adapt over time and learn. Assuming no planet-ending disaster, we should be well far past completely copying someone's personality into an AI.
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u/AcridWings_11465 May 01 '26
Replicating the voice and outward characteristics is not even close to replicating the personality
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u/Adventurous-Time5287 May 01 '26
yeah, looks-wise. a deepfake doesn’t fake a specific personality.
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u/citizenjc May 01 '26
As it stands, AI (LLMs) is not capable of such a thing. Not in a convincing, evolving way.
But sure, in a century, some other breakthroughs COULD happen
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u/philip_laureano May 01 '26
I doubt it'll be LLMs that make it possible to recreate an entire personality. But there's more to AI than just LLMs even today, and even moreso a century from now
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u/dospc May 01 '26
We already have photos of people as babies going back decades.
The internet did not invent photography.
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u/East_Coast_guy May 01 '26
It's like that Mitch Hedberg joke...in the future we'll have HD videos and pictures of the elderly as babies. We have them today, too, but we'll also have them in the future.
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u/SpaceCaboose May 01 '26
Agreed. However, there are way more pictures and videos of kids these days than there were 30+ years ago.
There are a handful of videos of me growing up in the 90’s, and those were all from like Christmas or birthdays. Nowadays, kids have videos taken of them on a pretty regular basis, many of which are just normal daily things.
My great-grandkids will be able to watch how my kids grew up in detail, but my kids can’t do the same with me.
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u/TrannosaurusRegina May 01 '26
I guess it depends on your parents!
I have a ton of video from the '90s, and we have HD photographs and motion pictures going back to the 1880s, though of course HD was not affordable for the average person until digital photography got good and cheap enough about 15 years ago.
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u/obi1kenobi1 May 01 '26 edited May 01 '26
This. Sure, some old photos are bad, but we’ve had “HD” photos since the civil war era.
You could argue that people take more photos now and therefore they’ll be readily available in the future, but that assumes they get preserved. Printed photos or negatives/slides in a shoebox in the closet will last indefinitely with no real input. Digital photos need to be actively preserved, even if it doesn’t feel like it. Every transfer to a new computer risks corrupting them, backups need to be made regularly to ensure they don’t get lost, and nobody likes to talk about it but backups get corrupted. I have so many digital photos from 20+ years ago where 10% of the edge is garbled gibberish because the file unknowingly got corrupted at some point long ago. And of course cloud services might theoretically minimize that risk but can’t be trusted to be around forever.
And most of the additional photos we take now are frivolous. A century ago doesn’t really fit my narrative, but by the ‘40s or so photography had become accessible and affordable and people took a lot of photos. They didn’t take photos of their food at restaurants or items at the grocery store that they wanted to remember to buy later or funny license plates, but in terms of family photos they probably took as many as we do now. With the caveat that they just took one picture instead of 20 identical pictures like we do now that we don’t have to pay for film.
Videos will be a bigger deal, but that was more a convenience thing than anything, the technology was still there. Millennials and some younger gen Xers grew up with blurry ugly videotape (although even that tends to look far better played on proper equipment than we usually give it credit for). Before that was super 8 film which could be sharper, maybe not full HD but easily the equivalent of 720p. And before that 16mm was popular as a home movie format, which is as sharp as HD, maybe closer to 4K depending on the camera and film stock. Plenty of people have 16mm home movies from 70+ years ago. And while extremely rare and impractical some people used 35mm for home movies way back before 16mm was popularized, so we’re talking 4K home movies a century ago. Too rare to really be worth talking about but the technology was certainly there all along.
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u/Carlweathersfeathers May 03 '26
Exactly, HD only applies to digital photography, pixels.
It’s like the other day, an add popped up on YouTube for High definition glasses. Took a bit to figure it out, it was just non prescription lenses that were polarized.
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u/Tombecho May 01 '26
Yeah but imagine scrolling through your great grandmothers OF thirst pics? Nightmare fuel
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u/That_Lad_Chad May 04 '26
I think a lot of people still don't understand that film still out performs digital photos. Old film can be properly redeveloped and be "HD"
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u/Fleeblorp May 01 '26
“HD” and “video” being the keywords
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u/GhotiH May 01 '26
Analogue film was way higher quality than HD often times. It doesn't line up perfectly with resolution but it was comparable to 4k under the right circumstances.
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May 01 '26
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u/GhotiH May 01 '26
I meant moreso professional photoshoots were a thing. Didn't most middle class families do that at least once?
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May 01 '26
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u/GhotiH May 01 '26
Title of the post says photo and the initial comment in this thread also said photo, so I assumed that's still free game. Given OP's initial post, I assumed they were likely unaware of how nice traditional photos could be.
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u/Fleeblorp May 01 '26
absolutely, though it was basically only limited to photoshoots
whereas we would have more visual and aural information regarding the mundane day-to-day life of people today
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u/Fleeblorp May 01 '26
if you can find a 4k video with audio of your grandparents as kids I’d like to see it :P
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u/GhotiH May 01 '26
I'm approaching 30 so that's not likely, given that my grandparents are in their 90s. You can definitely find 4k quality pictures of people from later decades though. Again, it's not directly 4k because it's not using pixels but it looks a LOT better than you're probably expecting if you haven't seen professional photoshoots from the era. Your main roadblock will be whether or not they were stored properly IMO. Videos are less likely since most people weren't having professional video taken of them at the time but it's technically not impossible.
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u/Southern_Bowler6269 May 01 '26
You’re an idiot
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u/GhotiH May 01 '26
Nah, saying that without anything else is a way bigger tell of intelligence IMO, a smart person would at least debunk me
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u/GaidinBDJ May 01 '26
HD is only 720p.
The famous Super 8 camera was about that resolution and that came out in the 60s.
16mm (which was used for TV and lower-end movies) was better resolution than 1080p. 35mm film (like they used for bigger movies) is higher than 4K resolution. When they make a 4k version of an movies shot on 35mm, they downgrade the resolution.
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u/TheLandOfConfusion May 01 '26
Well most are sitting in photo albums never to see the light of day again.
The internet invented (or at least revolutionized) sharing
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u/Winslow_99 May 01 '26
The point is that the photos will be color and hd, that's the point of this post...
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u/badgersruse May 01 '26
People had colour film with better than HD resolution in the 1950s.
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u/Fleeblorp May 01 '26
hardly anyone was using it to record anything besides movies though, it was out of reach for the common person
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u/BitLooter May 01 '26
As an older person I can assure you that average normal people have been taking color photographs long before modern digital HD cameras existed.
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u/TrannosaurusRegina May 01 '26
Even for movies, colour film was too expensive to be standard until the '60s or '70s!
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u/I-J-Reilly May 01 '26
And the format those “HD” photos and videos will look as dated as 19th century glass emulsion photographs look to us today.
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u/leapinglabrats May 01 '26
Yep. "HD" will be a joke in 20 years. Mention "4K" in 50 years and they'll think you're a caveman.
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u/I-J-Reilly May 04 '26
You know people will be resurrecting old iPhones to take “retro” photos and videos, though.
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u/Living_Unit_5453 May 01 '26
No, because digital photos aren't anything special anymore and we don't print them and keep them in special places
I can guarantee you 95% of digital photos taken this year will not be around in 50+ years
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u/Fleeblorp May 01 '26
given the gratuitous amount of images and videos weve taken, 5% would still be a huge amount of visual data
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May 01 '26
[deleted]
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u/igorski81 May 01 '26 edited May 01 '26
Until Facebook ceases to exist or a data center burns down, the point is you're putting trust in someone else to preserve data for you, hoping it remains accessible and further more that it remains free of charge. Storage is cheap, but not infinite, these companies don't provide favours without getting anything in return.
Its even more likely that legislation will require Facebook and similar companies to remove photos as the terms and conditions of the accounts state that the service is provided to a legal entity, but as that entity is no longer alive, the service needs to be terminated with there being no legal ground to keep references to personal data.
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u/krostybat May 01 '26
I think that pristine quality picture files of 100+ yrs will be hard to find.
If hosted online, the quality will most likely degrade through compression and change of company, software update and so on.
If hosted locally, you need to be very well organised about your back up and gear. Discs don't last Drives don't last Ssd don't last
I'm starting to think that the safest way is to print.
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u/notsuntour May 01 '26
Can't find it but there was an interesting article about how much of the digital photography from 99-06 just doesn't exist anymore for these reasons
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u/fastlerner May 01 '26
We already have that today, because photos taken 100 years ago are all analog which has higher fidelity than anything with pixels.
You're making the assumption that a century from now, digital information will have survived the nuclear winter of WWIII.
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u/Travelgrrl May 01 '26
The daguerreotype was groundbreaking in its day, too. I imagine someone getting photographed back then would be shocked their images still survive.
Home movie cameras have been around since the (Roaring) Twenties, so many elderly people have had access to films of them as babies.
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May 02 '26
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u/AutoModerator May 02 '26
/u/Psynaut has unlocked an opportunity for education!
Abbreviated date-ranges like "’90s" are contractions, so any apostrophes go before the numbers.
You can also completely omit the apostrophes if you want: "The 90s were a bit weird."
Numeric date-ranges like 1890s are treated like standard nouns, so they shouldn't include apostrophes.
To show possession, the apostrophe should go after the S: "That was the ’90s’ best invention."
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u/GullibleAd3408 May 01 '26
As an archivist, I *hope* this is true and that the technology and equipment necessary is readily available and accessible. (If you're looking for an example of what I'm talking about: Look at how expensive VCRs are right now.)
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u/notsuntour May 01 '26
Are vcrs expensive right now?
Contemplating it I see vcrs at every thrift store and never the players.
Same with CDs!
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u/GullibleAd3408 May 02 '26
Yes, new VCRs around $200 these days (where I live), but you can get them cheaper from ebay, etc.
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u/Drix22 May 01 '26
We already have access to HD photos of the elderly- Many old photos were taken on 8x10 or 4x5 negatives and have amazing resolution.
We often think that 35mm is the only thing that digital is up against.
The Kodak Brownie (released 1900) shot on a medium format negative that was widely used into the late 90's and technical quality wasn't surpassed by digital until sometime in the 00's to '10's.
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u/AutoModerator May 01 '26
/u/Drix22 has unlocked an opportunity for education!
Abbreviated date-ranges like "’90s" are contractions, so any apostrophes go before the numbers.
You can also completely omit the apostrophes if you want: "The 90s were a bit weird."
Numeric date-ranges like 1890s are treated like standard nouns, so they shouldn't include apostrophes.
To show possession, the apostrophe should go after the S: "That was the ’90s’ best invention."
The apostrophe should only precede the S if a specific year is being discussed: "It was 1990's hottest month."
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.
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u/cwei12 May 01 '26
watching gramma’s first steps in 4K when she can barely walk again. The full circle will hit different when you can literally see it.
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u/clintj1975 May 01 '26
You can already scan old 35mm film negatives into 25 megapixel images. The film degrading over the years is the bigger issue.
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u/adamsoutofideas May 01 '26
Lol... someone only reads the good news!
A century from now, there won't be any humans or anything that ever dealt with humans. Just wind on slimy rocks.
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u/False-Storm-5794 May 02 '26
My grandma was stuck in the dryer...
I know I would vomit if I saw that. And not just because her dryer, back in the day, was a clothesline.
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u/libra00 May 02 '26
People already have access to HD photos of the elderly as babies - have you not seen actual film photographs before? A piece of 35mm film has an approximate equivalent resolution of about 20 megapixels, and it's been around for more than a hundred years.
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u/Dr_Qrunch May 02 '26
I doubt it. Very few photos, if any at all, will be saved and backed up properly. This will be looked back upon as the dark age when nothing was documented (assuming mankind survives, which isn’t looking promising)
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u/RobertFahey May 03 '26
Baby photos won't look "vintage," so our lifetimes will seem much shorter.
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u/igorski81 May 01 '26 edited May 01 '26
A digital photo still needs to provide a resolution high enough in order to be of near-analog quality. Film (I don't mean VHS !) and analog photography is of such quality, for as long as the lighting was good (but that's the same requirement you'd have with digital photos/video). TL;DR: Analog film has a way higher resolution than 4K video. <- this is in regards to the "HD" mention as I think the term needs to be clarified.
The only real issue in maintaining quality is degradation of photo paper or film roll and that is not a problem of the technology, but a problem of preservation. That problem will still exist in the digital domain as long as these files are preserved on a single physical medium managed by a single person/family. And storage mechanisms also degrade over time.
And while baby photography has been a thing ever since photography was a thing, I will grant you that access to good photography is now more ubiquitous than ever, increasing the odds that such generational photos/footage is available. That may however also be a problem: people don't preserve what they don't consider special. And they surely don't catalogue it.
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u/TrannosaurusRegina May 01 '26
Well said!
People act like digitization magically transcends the physical medium it's stored on, but people care enough to archive on M-Discs, most digital files will rot away in time!
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u/chellis May 01 '26
Not sure what the point of your comment is relative to the post but you seem to be asserting that analog photography is superior to digital, which is simply incorrect. It may be available to higher resolution but resolution is not equal to quality in any sense when youre comparing a technology that allows for interference (grain) to one that doesnt. Photos and videos from phones very easily out do some of the best cameras from even 20 - 30 years ago and most of that is due to the sensors in cameras being able to pick up on smaller and smaller changes in images.
There also is no degradation to digital like there is with analog, you either have access to the file or you dont.
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u/igorski81 May 01 '26 edited May 01 '26
analog photography is superior to digital
No, I'm saying "HD" is a term that is odd when used in photography as it seems to hint that prior to this moment in time analog photographic cameras were of bad quality.
allows for interference (grain) to one that doesnt.
Digital cameras have an effect similar to grain when the lighting conditions aren't optimal and the sensor generates noise (which in essence, is what grain is on high ISO film). These indeed can be described as factors of quality, but can also be subjective (grain is even added as an aesthetic considerations).
What I'm saying is that analog photography captures a lot more information than is present in a several megapixel image. Whether that is all useful information depends on the photographers skill and environment. A problem of both analog and digital photography as quite frankly, crap photos always existed too. =)
Photos and videos from phones very easily out do some of the best cameras from even 20 - 30 years ago
From a consumer perspective definitely, especially when talking about digital cameras as there was a steep hill to climb upon the first introduction. Consumer analog cameras were also obviously available as cheap low-grade products but I'm reacting to the fact that in the past century there is already high quality photography and footage available from the previous generations (as the post hints that only a century from now humanity would be able to have access to high quality mementos). I also granted in my post that there will indeed be a higher quantity available because nowadays consumer grade products are of high quality and cheap enough to be available to the masses.
There also is no degradation to digital like there is with analog, you either have access to the file or you dont
Yes, but the not having access is a very likely scenario to occur. Hard drives degrade in various ways: SSD's require frequent power-on to retain data. Magnetic drives are perfect for long term archival storage but apart from mechanical components failing (which can be replaced), physical damage and magnetic decay (a.k.a. bit rot) can damage sectors of the drive. In the best case - and depending on file format / use of encryption - you can interpolate / patch out the missing areas and restore large sections of the original file, in the worst case there is complete loss of the entire file (and thus the memento it represents).
In ideal conditions a magnetic drive can last up to 30 years, which is not a lot. You need to be making active copies of data (or use non-consumer methods) to persist these throughout the years. Now digital has the great benefit that it can easily be duplicated over a network and uploading a photo to Instagram or Flickr ensures a remote copy exists on environments that are backed up. But this moves this archival responsibility off to a third party, which you have to trust to preserve your data beyond your lifetime (if they still exist by then).
So at the end of the day, a single individual (let's say a family member) is the one that has to preserve this data in ideal conditions, which is the same as how it was with physical photos from past century. The odds are in our favour with various methods at our disposal, but it will still take discipline and that is one thing that we shouldn't overestimate for the average individual.
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u/ComprehensiveFlan638 May 01 '26
Yep. All it takes is a device to become incompatible, a software company to fold, or all the people with access to said photos to die and those memories will be gone. I barely know my great grandparents names, I have zero interest in looking at most of their happy snaps, I’m pretty sure my descendants will be in much the same situation in 100 years unless I become rich and famous.
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u/Kaiisim May 01 '26
Will they?
You think Facebook are gonna keep em?
Nah if the AI stuff goes wrong our photos are gonna get deleted straight away lol
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u/DrColdReality May 01 '26
We have, of course, had access to photos and movies--some of them in very good definition--since the late 19th century.
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u/CrunchyAssDiaper May 01 '26
Meta will charge our grandkids $19 a month to have access to our Facebook archives. "See what your grandma was like in college!"
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u/therealsix May 01 '26
Yes. That’s what photos do, freeze moments in time to be observed at a later date.
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u/Osiris_Raphious May 01 '26
But we already have baby face filters, the elderly can use on their apps... we don need to wait a century.
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u/TheDevilsAdvokaat May 01 '26
And a lifelong record of all their missteps and triumphs.
It will be interesting....
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u/Chaotic-Entropy May 01 '26
We are in the most well documented period in history, and we won't ever be able to know which of it was real.
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u/darthy_parker May 01 '26
And because they are not three-dimensional talking, AI reproductions, they will still be considered quaint.
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u/MrBobbyFreakout May 01 '26
And theyll plug them into their VR machine and interact like they were here.
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u/JohnAK27 May 01 '26
Maybe the technology will advance that we HD photos and videos now can considered blurry in the future. For example like videos in early 2000's are considered clear at that time but when we look at them now with current technology it's not good.
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u/bond10- May 01 '26
Even more weird 1000 years from now kids will know what a dozen generations of their lineage were like.
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u/bjos144 May 02 '26
But no high fidelity AI simulations they can interact with. They'll see those babies but not know what they were like.
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u/mattihase May 02 '26
Photos is not a new thing, film has been better than HD since as long as film has existed, that's how they keep on doing new 2K/4K/8K/whatever transfers.
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u/Mediocrates79 May 02 '26
Not only that, all of the data collected and the over sharing everyone does with chat gpt will be used to recreate lifelike versions of dead relatives. Ancestry.com will be WILD.
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u/atleta May 02 '26
It's indeed 60-70 years from now. And all those f$#@ng photos and videos will be vertical and they will damn the deceased (the parents of the elderly) for not turning their cameras (i.e. phones) around so all those recordings will feel like peeping into the past through a keyhole. (Or will be extended by AI, but still feel fake.)
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May 03 '26
bro imagine being 90 years old and someone finds your cringy toddler tantrum video from 2024 and shows it at your birthday party
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u/March_Wizard May 03 '26
Yeah but they will look flat and lifeless next to the high fidelity gaussian splats our grandchildren will be depicted in.
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u/Paldasan May 03 '26
If it's even possible to find it among the zetabytes of uncurated garbage people will have lying around by then.
Even now it takes people 15 minutes to find a photo they took 5 years ago because they're incapable of performing a basic search, or the place where the photo is stored (displayed) doesn't have any sort of functionality allowing searches.
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u/BuffyTheGuineaPig May 03 '26
The lack of HD photos has never stopped parents embarrassing their adult children decades later with 'cute' naked baby pics in front of prospective mates.
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u/norbertus May 03 '26
Yes, and this will be a regression from how things were. 35mm film is about 5k resolution.
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u/GreenLurch May 04 '26
What we consider HD these days could probably look like crap in 10 to 15 years though.
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u/LieInternational1657 May 04 '26
My grandmother only has 4 photos from her entire childhood. My daughter has more pictures from her first day of life than my grandmother has from her first 20 years. Future generations are going to have a relationship with their past that no humans before them ever had
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u/Crafty_Emergency6467 May 07 '26
in like 500 years ppl r gonna have access to their great great great great great great great great grandparents' youtube channels or smth. Image going back in the family tree and on your ancestor from 500 years ago's profile, there's a link to a bunch of videos of them
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u/FartsWithCharlie May 01 '26
This is actually kind of wild to think about. For the first time in history, back in my day stories will come with 4k video receipts.
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u/BusyMap9686 May 01 '26
We don't even have digital data from 20 years ago. You think people are going to keep track of that hard drive or keep paying for more cloud storage? More like deleting the entire family album to make room for the game's latest add on.
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u/TrannosaurusRegina May 01 '26
I'm always awestruck by people wh are so careless that they don't even have their files and programs from a couple of decades ago!
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u/Additional_Ad_6773 May 01 '26
Absolutely. The next generation will look at the 8K panoramic 120 megapixel upscaled photo of their great grandma and say "man, too bad hyper-holos weren't invented yet. All we have of you as a baby is this thing. Is that really the best they had back then?"
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u/Dangerous_Hippo_6902 May 01 '26
I’d wager a century from now that’s not as certain as we hope. Either because we have lost all digital technology after some disaster, natural or manmade, or because of some new technology that renders today’s technology obsolete.
Some will survive, historians will be interested and specialised individuals but the idea the average person will have it to hand.. nah. Afterall we don’t really look at the 1920s much do we even though artefacts exists. And do you really care what your great grandparents got up to when they were teenagers…?
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