Microsoft's Project Silica promises eternal storage. It can't get there from here

Opinion There is more joy in heaven over a single report of genuinely new technology than in a thousand desperate AI marketing pitches. What the angels will make of Microsoft's Project Silica, a mixture of the two, is less clear.

The good bits first, and they are truly good. Project Silica is a Microsoft research effort into data storage in glass, not in itself a new idea but one with plenty of innovation. It's gone through various iterations of how to write data into different sorts of glass matrices and how to read it out again. Project Silica can now store 2 TB in hundreds of layers within a 2 mm thick borosilicate glass plate. There are femtosecond laser pulses and machine learning readers. Proper science-led engineering.

The reason this matters is genuine. As a digital culture, we are extraordinarily good at growing and using data, and extraordinarily ...