Photos back then took a long time to prepare for, and a long time afterwards to process. Only professionals could create them. Once you had a photograph in your possession, you cared for it and treated it like a precious object.

Over the ensuing decades, improved technology made photos increasingly common, cheap and disposable. And, in fact, the pace of that trend has never stopped accelerating. Soon, we will reach a kind of singularity where pictures are as easy and cheap to take as they are not to take, and they will be infinitely disposable.

When that happens, the default mode for most cameras will be to never stop taking pictures.

To paraphrase cyberpunk author William Gibson, the future of constantly capturing cameras is already here; it's just not widely distributed yet.

What's so great about a camera that never stops taking photos? Constant picture taking has one advantage, and one disadvantage.