There are other considerations as well. We could probably preserve works for longer if we kept them sealed away in darkness, but we value these works in part because of what we get by experiencing them. What we get out of them as artistic works makes them worth taking such good care of as opposed to just being something that's really really old.
Society wants to see these things, and learn from them, even though every moment they spend out in the open exposes them to more harms.
We're fortunate that digitizing has come such a long way. We can preserve and even recreate a lot of things long after the physical objects themselves are gone. It's not the same as having the originals, but at a certain point the reproductions are all we'll have left.
That's what I was wondering. We can't redirect the entire output of society towards museum conservation, so some tradeoffs will have to be made. That isn't a problem, just reality.
It's hard to measure the information content of anything, because information is fundamentally about differences which matter, and we don't always know what matters. The text content can be preserved dutifully through centuries through copying, then in our time, we find out that what we really would have wanted was the handwriting style of the original, or the environmental DNA from pollen attached to the original vellum...
But even so, there's so much archive material which hasn't even been digitized. I run into it in genealogy all the time. It's in some box in a museum, if you're lucky they made microfiche images of it fifty years ago.
HN is actually more likely to call it “basically AGI” than most communities. HN is very much not particularly AI-skeptical compared to other communities.
It is and has been a solid screenshot choice for a long time and has existed as OSS for a decade.
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