IEEE Spectrum June 26, 2019
The highest prefix in the international system of units is yotta, Y is 10 to the power of 24. We’ll have that many bytes within a decade. And once we start creating more than 50 trillion bytes of information per person per year, will there be any real chance of making effective use of it? It is easier to find new prefixes for large databases than to decide how large is large enough. After all, there are fundamental differences between accumulated data, useful information, and insightful knowledge…read more.
A picture is worth 5 million bytes. Credit: Mark Montgomery/IEEE Spectrum