Internet in Pocket

I wanted to make this a video like the Silicon Valley Radio on Internet scene, but I decided I can't act, make television, or be funny, so I didn't do anything. Today we have unlimited access to everything on the internet at all times in our pocket. But all of that data is actually stored on "the cloud", which is just thousands of warehouses filled with hard drives all over the world. But what if we could literally hold all of the data of the internet in our pocket? I’ve been following the development of DNA storage for a while because I think it is a random shift in technology that could have material impact to various industries. Historically, Moore’s law (storage size doubles and physical size halves every two years) has applied to storage disks. From magnetic drums to punch cards to spinning disk drives to solid state drives, digital storage space has been decreasing in physical size and increasing in storage size exponentially since the 1950s. We’re now at the point that in order to fit more transistors onto a chip, it’s getting so small that we will soon have to go microscopic. And just as fundamentally new ways to store data have arisen over the years, there is a new method being designed which reads and writes information on strands of DNA. Using biological material would allow for such radically compressed data that, according to Microsoft, “all the information stored in a warehouse-size data center would fit into a set of Yahztee dice, were it written in DNA.” They have successfully written the word “hello” onto a strand of DNA and extracted it. Seems like a small win for now, but the implications are huge. The obvious industries affected are hard disk drive makers, data center REITs, and companies that charge for data storage. Beneficiaries are consumers and big tech that pays for warehouses full of drives. Storing the entirety of the internet on a laptop is pretty awesome, and I’m sure we’ll see new uses for such compact storage going forward.