Abundance is Here

[Herkimer Jitty]

Yeah, not entirely sure how that's advancement. Is it really an improvement that instead of wandering around thinking douchebaggy thoughts, people now text, blog, tweet, AND post about it? Generates a TON more bytes of data, but so what?

Thinking your cat is funny and posting the pitcture to teh interwebs has about the same societal value, you're just assigning significance to meaningless crap and becoming shocked at the results.

Number of people sending a text that says "LOL" at any moment probably outnumbers the number of people reading a book, but that's not progress. Number of people that haven't read a book in the last 6 months has probably declined significantly, and at an increasing rate as well? End of the world, or random statistic?

wats a buk lol

sry i dunt kno these things

i was born in 1990 so im illeterut

srry yur werld is ending

its mah falt 4 nut readin enuff

 

[T'Girl]

Our ancesters couldn't record every last thing, so they didn't. There was a difficulty to the first exabyte, so the important stuff (for the most part) was kept.

What some have said here is truth, compare the percentage of profound in the first exabyte, to the percentage of profound in the second exabyte.

And look at what the information is being used for, what has happen to your privacy just in the last few decades? Google brags about how they are assembling personal files on all of their users, records "preferences," and smugly refuses to erase the personal information if asked.

The governments are placing cameras everywhere, which they access through the internet.

Don't get me wrong, information in general, and as a concept, is a wonderful thing. But, the potential for negatives is inherently in it.

")

 

[Shatnertage]

I'd be more inclined to say that things are better now because of better sanitation, better availability of food, and better medicine, all of which have lead to increases in lifespan.

I don't have much to back me up here besides a hunch, and I'm not going to man the barricades defending this theory, so feel free to shoot it down. I'd say that humans have always handled roughly the same amounts of information, and it's just that the way of getting that information has changed. Once it was oral tradition and simple observation. Now it's digitally shared and stored.

Is there any fundamental difference between listening to gossip about the goings-on in the next cave over and seeing status updates about the friend of a friend's kid's new quad-runner? I'm skeptical.

 

[sojourner]

Have to disagree with you there. My car generates more information than I am guessing most medieval peasants had to deal with in a day.

 

[Robert Maxwell]

I'd be more inclined to say that things are better now because of better sanitation, better availability of food, and better medicine, all of which have lead to increases in lifespan.

I don't have much to back me up here besides a hunch, and I'm not going to man the barricades defending this theory, so feel free to shoot it down. I'd say that humans have always handled roughly the same amounts of information, and it's just that the way of getting that information has changed. Once it was oral tradition and simple observation. Now it's digitally shared and stored.

Is there any fundamental difference between listening to gossip about the goings-on in the next cave over and seeing status updates about the friend of a friend's kid's new quad-runner? I'm skeptical.

You did hit one nail right on the head: sanitation. We take it for granted, but it was one of the biggest single advancements in human history. Humans used to be exposed to dramatically higher levels of ambient microbes. That's why seemingly trivial injuries (like a small cut) often led to sepsis and death. Nowadays, you get a small wound and you probably don't have to do much of anything to avoid infection except maybe keep it covered with a bandage for a few days. The risk of a life-threatening infection is quite low, and even if you do get an infection, as long as you seek quick treatment it won't kill you.

That said, not all of humanity has reaped the benefits of sanitation--witness the ongoing cholera epidemic in Jamaica.

On the subject of how much useful information there is: I think there's a lot more today than in the past, for the reasons others have laid out. There are simply more people, thus more communication and information. Our ability to share information instantly allows quicker synthesis of additional information. And then there's the fact that we can store it so cheaply. But a lot of information is of very limited relevance beyond a specific use case. Witness sojourner's car example. That kind of data is only useful either in aggregate (thinking engineering QA stats) or in specific emergency/maintenance situations (car accident, mechanic, etc.) Its general usefuless is rather low, and I think that signifies perhaps the biggest difference in the types of information we store now. Most of it is very specific in terms of content and purpose, largely due to how highly specialized the labor forces in developed countries have become. The amount of generally useful information has increased at a greater rate, but I don't think it's exploding nearly as fast as specialized information does. This isn't necessarily a good thing or a bad thing, just an observation. One way to look at it is that all the "easy" science has been done, and likewise the simplest tasks have either been totally automated or made into documented routines any literate person can follow. So our needs, as a civilization, revolve much more around that highly-specialized information than more general knowledge.