[frobozz]

What is the likelihood that historians a century or two hence will have an application capable of turning an ISO 32000-1 file into a human-readable text?

If we are talking about archaeologists, rather than historians, even ASCII and Unicode could be a challenge to work out.

[croon]

Because those hundreds of years don't transpire in a glimpse. At some point in the middle there will be deprecated formats and new ones, and transcoders you can batch run. Sure it relies on intervention, but the upside is any/everyone else can copy the one persons work.

Yes we should learn from history, but we should also not assume that everything that happened before will happen the same way again, given how much of our world has changed.

[frobozz]

> However, without archivists actively transforming content to new formats as required, it might only take a few decades before a lot of content starts to require a massive effort to read.

[croon]

More effort than batch reading physical books and tablets in old languages?

You can reuse interfaces easier on data, and current ML could probably pull some of the weight of interpreting old data right now, not to mention what we have 50 years from now.

[erikpukinskis]

0.99999 at least.

Compare the capabilities of digital historians today to those 10- and 20-years ago respectively. It’s night and day.