There’s a corp solution called “CyberArk” that’s intended for storing passwords and other secrets and providing an audit trail for every access, as well as access controls, etc. It’s nothing like a solution for personal data storage, but those core concepts would be great.

1. Your stored data is under access control.
2. Configuration of access to this data (write, read, and access frequency) is controlled by you.
3. Access grants to others are time limited (although, maximum time may be 10 years or more.)
4. Every data access is configured to be logged by default.
5. Access to important data can be configured to require real-time authorization by the owner.
6. Full change history is logged by default and thereby all changes can be reversed.
7. Only the owner can choose to delete change history.
8. Only the owner can choose to delete logs.

The trick is getting Meta, Alphabet, X, banks, retailers, libraries and the rest to agree to use this API for storage of your data. The next (impossible) trick is enforcing their secure deletion of copies of your data in a timely fashion after they have accessed it.

A software tester walks into a bar, he orders a beer.

He orders -1 beers.

He orders 0 beers.

He orders 843909245824 beers.

He orders duck beers.

AI can be trained to do that, but if you are in a not-well-trodden space, you’ll want to be defining your own edge cases in addition to whatever AI comes up with.

There have been a few “milestone moments” like map-reduce Hadoop, etc. Still, there’s a whole lot of eye candy wrapped around the same old basic concepts.

Repackaging old technology in slick new interfaces is what we have been calling progress in computer software for 40+ years.

In the beginning there were manufacturer’s manuals, spec sheets, etc.

Then there were magazines, like Byte, InfoWorld, Compute! that showed you a bit more than just the specs

Then there were books, including the X for Dummies series that purported to teach you theory and practice

Then there was Google / Stack Overflow and friends

Somewhere along there, where depends a lot on your age, there were school / University courses

Now we have “AI mode”

Each step along that road has offered a significant speedup, connecting ideas to theory to practice.

I agree, all the “magic bullet” AI hype is far overblown. However, with AI something I new I can do is, interactively, develop a specification and a program. Throw out the code several times while the spec gets refined, re-implemented, tried in different languages with different libraries. It’s still only good for “small” projects, but less than a year ago “small” meant less than 1000 lines of code. These days I’m seeing 300 lines of specification turn into 1500-3000 lines of code and have it running successfully within half a day.

I don’t know if we’re going to face a Kurzweilian singularity where these things start improving themselves at exponential rates, or if we’ll hit another 30 year plateau like neural nets did back in the 1990s… As things are, Claude helps me make small projects several times faster than I could ever do with Google and Stack Overflow. And you can build significant systems out of cooperating small projects.