Historians of the future will have to be able to program computers, so as to interpret past data storage formats eg jpeg in 2030 and use their insights to piece together what has happened in the past. Or to create a program to convert old formats to new etc etc.
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And if they don't, vast and important segments of knowledge will be lost, as irrevocably as a papyrus burnt to ashes.
Yeah, this struck me when I was doing an essay for History of Mathematics...just how little of the knowledge of the past survived.
We recently figured out that Pythagoras' theorem was known some 2000 years before Pythagoras.
Anyway, unfortunately, despite our digital storage systems, the same will happen to the knowledge of our societies, due to unreadability (especially after compression), old formats, lack of indexing and searchability and everything else.
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