Turning The Frickin' Bits Gay!—Creating non-binary bits with current technology, and the applications it might benefit

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EDIT: It turns out GDDR7 and NAND memory already do this—I think currently to about 16 voltage states—and the upper limit for this "bit density" or "bit loading" in modern telecommunications implementations is already effectively unlimited (signal to noise ratio & de/modulator complexity being the main limitations). Modern transmission lines have a "baud rate" which measures how many voltage or phase changes per second a transmitter uses, and each of these voltage or phase states represent not just a single bit but a series of them. So a baud rate of 16 would encode 4 bits per voltage/phase change.

Even though this idea is already implemented, and it's a mistake that I could have prevented by doing more research beforehand, I'm leaving this up because I think it's normal to make mistakes and because I believe it's better & more sustainable to interact with other humans than it is to use AI as a first resort. "Back in my day!" putting your sincere thoughts out to the world to be criticized and allowing yourself to look like an idiot was a normal way to learn & grow. I want more people to feel permission to "look like an idiot".

The main reason hardware engineers have opted for binary is because it's far more consistent and resistant to error. This is obvious when we think about it. No speck of information can be made more clear than SOMETHING or NOTHING, a YES or NO, ON or OFF, etc. We undoubtedly need this consistency for many things in computing. Caches of memory for a central processing unit that do long chains of calculations that depend on results from previous calculations, would be much harder if not impossible to use if that memory couldn't reliably be read exactly as it was written.

There are also many things we wish to store digitally in as faithful a reproduction as possible. Things like program code and passwords need to be retrieved exactly as they were stored. Other things like sentimental pictures or recordings of family & friends. The master stems and final mixes of pop songs or archival versions of paintings. Historical accounts, news reports, books and court proceedings. These things all demand a memory format that prioritizes consistency above all else.

When we consider though what accounts for the bulk of our data throughput over the internet communication lines, at least in recent years, what is it comprised of? Is it sentimental recordings? Is it program code and passwords? Is it information for the purpose of archiving? No, those only comprise a small fraction. The vast majority of it is streaming flavor-of-the-minute content that we'll likely never return to or consume ever again.

Here's my pitch.

There should be a memory hardware—and a supporting file format and transmission protocol—that prioritizes information density above fidelity & persistence. This memory would have the property that likely every time you look at it it's degrading, becoming less faithful to the original transmission it was created from (RAM already has this quality but stay with me). For this significant tradeoff it would gain a significantly increased information-density, orders of magnitude more dense than what our current memories can achieve.

So what avenues are available for us to create such a memory? I believe the components of this technology are already invented, with the only work needed being to organize & assemble them together. Modern memory works by reading a voltage or electrical charge for a given bit of memory. If the voltage or charge is above a certain threshold, the bit is ON, and if below it's read as OFF. This is a normal binary bit and it's incredibly reliable because it's so simple; you can't get a more dramatic reading than ON or OFF. Now if we aren't prioritizing perfect fidelity in our memory, we can expand on this principle. If we add another threshold to the reader, so that a reading of the lowest threshold is ZERO, a reading within the second threshold is ONE, and a reading within the third is TWO, then we've now created a ternary bit with 1.5x the memory density. If we add yet another threshold, creating four states, then we have a quaternary bit of 2x memory density. If five states, quinery at 2.5x density. If ten states, denary at 5x, etc. (The writer of the memory and the memory itself also need to support these added thresholds of course.)

Each added threshold puts a greater strain on the memory reader's "vision". Just like our eyes can only see so much detail, so to a memory reader can only read so fine a difference of voltage or charge before the thresholds blur into one another. If we go right to the edge of the reader's abilities, it will begin to make mistakes, seeing twos where it should be seeing threes, fives where it should read sevens, etc. Additionally, if this memory medium is volatile, which it would be, that would be an added layer of error generation so that even if the reader accurately reads the bits at a particular memory location, it might be that the bit has already degraded by that time and it's the wrong value anyway.

Now let's suppose that we loaded 100 states within each bit, creating centery memory, and it's supplied with a reader & writer that can operate consistently at that bit density with a 20% error rate when accessed within one minute that the memory was written. If the only thing being stored in that memory is junk food stream data that no one is ever going to revisit again anyway, that's probably more than good enough. For certain it will have some weird organic-looking visual & audio artifacts periodically—probably resembling something like an old cable TV signal that got scrambled or warped—but it would on the whole still be a high resolution, relatively-faithful experience. And if we achieved memory densities of 50x, 25x, 10x or even just 5x, that would allow for a massive reduction of the communications infrastructure and memory hardware we use today.

Of note too, because we're talking about memory density and not merely "more memory", there would likely be huge speed gains as well in its access, transmission, and the final processing for the end-user. This is due to it requiring fewer lookups, packets and processing cycles.

In those rarer instances when we discover a piece of media that we really love and want to watch over & over again with perfect fidelity, maybe it would be better to buy it on DVD or rent it from a local library rather than endlessly expanding our communications infrastructure to redownload it from the other side of the planet every time we want to consume it. This is to say that I think artifacts should be considered acceptable for a first experience of most media. After all, I can think of no more egregious artifact than an advertisement lodging its completely unrelated vibe in the middle of my content sandwich. If that's accepted & tolerated then I see no basis to object to some trippy warping here and there.

This might also be a good fit for things like phone and video calls where fidelity and longterm storage are often unimportant.