Abundance is Here

[RAMA]

#1 on Amazon and Barnes in Noble in it's first week, this basically distills what any up-to-date sci-tech fanatic knows into an easily digestible form for all of the world to read.

If every image made and every word written from the earliest stirring of civilization to the year 2003 were converted to digital information, the total would come to five exabytes. An exabyte is one quintillion bytes, or one billion gigabytes—or just think of it as the number one followed by 18 zeros. That's a lot of digital data, but it's nothing compared with what happened from 2003 through 2010: We created five exabytes of digital information every two days. Get ready for what's coming: By next year, we'll be producing five exabytes every 10 minutes. How much information is that? The total for 2010 of 912 exabytes is the equivalent of 18 times the amount of information contained in all the books ever written. The world is not just changing, and the change is not just accelerating; the rate of the acceleration of change is itself accelerating.

I thought this paragraph was enlightening in light of some of the comments made on some threads here that we haven't advanced much in 1000 years...

Pre-ordered mine and through 130 pages in a few hrs. A breezy read. Doesn't negate, but counters the negativity in much of the modern civilized world about the present and future.

RAMA

 

[YellowSubmarine]

If someone gave cavemen cameras to record images of their cats, your measure of advancement would be suddenly meaningless.

 

[Lindley]

Books take up much less space than HD video. I don't think there's much more to it than that.

 

[RAMA]

If someone gave cavemen cameras to record images of their cats, your measure of advancement would be suddenly meaningless.

Obviously this is a fraction of the book, yet to take your example, not all of the information generated up till 2003 was worth all the much either(not to mention the simple fact that modern times generated the video camera...including everything that led to it's development, it's ccd camera or optical media, etc.). I would dare to say that if you took time to quantify it, more of the post-2003 data would be valuable or relevant today...and of course any such statement that we haven't advanced in most areas in a 1000 years is easily dismissed on other grounds..not that the previous info wasn't valuable in it's basis for exponential advancement of today.

 

[RAMA]

Videos:

https://www.facebook.com/abundancebook?sk=app_57675755167

Wall Street Journal Review:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203646004577213203698503484.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

 

[sojourner]

I would dare to say that if you took time to quantify it, more of the post-2003 data would be valuable or relevant today...

I think you seriously under estimate the amount of LOLcatz images/video out there.

 

[Pavonis]

I'm starting to think lolcatz outnumbers porn on the internet.

 

[FordSVT]

"Information" is a broad term. We're just texting and Tweeting, shooting a lot of HD video and pictures that require a lot of digital 1s and 0s to encode.

 

[Scout101]

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?

 

[Robert Maxwell]

It's only the availability of cheap storage and bandwidth that has permitted this data explosion, not some great advancement in human intelligence. Imagine if every note ever written for any reason throughout history was somehow preserved--would we find value in every last bit of it? Probably not. Calling everything on the Internet "information" is rather generous. While you could glean a lot of insights by analyzing the data, I don't think ten billion lolcat images contribute all that much to overall human knowledge and probably don't need to be preserved for future generations. 99% of everything is crap, we're just better at keeping copies of crap than we used to be.

 

[Scout101]

Exactly. Cats were just as silly 200 years ago, just no one was taking pictures and writing captions about them...

 

[RAMA]

"Information" is a broad term. We're just texting and Tweeting, shooting a lot of HD video and pictures that require a lot of digital 1s and 0s to encode.

Txting and tweeting can often have valuable data in itself, as several dictators have discovered in recent years. Interactiviy/social networking is also a huge communication explosion in it's own right, compare that to the era of the pony express when socialization was in smaller groups and news traveled in weeks or months....the 150 years hence a mere speck in human civilized history. Google itself has greater potential computing power than any supercomputer. None of this HD video picture nonsense that's being mentioned negates the overwhelming amount of useful information generated.

RAMA

 

[RAMA]

It's only the availability of cheap storage and bandwidth that has permitted this data explosion, not some great advancement in human intelligence. Imagine if every note ever written for any reason throughout history was somehow preserved--would we find value in every last bit of it? Probably not. Calling everything on the Internet "information" is rather generous. While you could glean a lot of insights by analyzing the data, I don't think ten billion lolcat images contribute all that much to overall human knowledge and probably don't need to be preserved for future generations. 99% of everything is crap, we're just better at keeping copies of crap than we used to be.

Way to go...underestimating the value of the results of decades of exponential growth that has only NOW allowed these things to happen and technology to grow from industrial to information. You've completely missed the point. You're not asking the right questions...what has allowed it to be this cheap? Human genius is still powering the price-performance increase we are seeing, when human intelligence is not enough, it will evolve and grow along with the technology, hand-in-hand (or mind-in-mind).

Exactly. Cats were just as silly 200 years ago, just no one was taking pictures and writing captions about them...

To many who love cats this has tremendous value to them of course.

RAMA

 

[Robert Maxwell]

It's only the availability of cheap storage and bandwidth that has permitted this data explosion, not some great advancement in human intelligence. Imagine if every note ever written for any reason throughout history was somehow preserved--would we find value in every last bit of it? Probably not. Calling everything on the Internet "information" is rather generous. While you could glean a lot of insights by analyzing the data, I don't think ten billion lolcat images contribute all that much to overall human knowledge and probably don't need to be preserved for future generations. 99% of everything is crap, we're just better at keeping copies of crap than we used to be.

Way to go...underestimating the value of the results of decades of exponential growth that has only NOW allowed these things to happen and technology to grow from industrial to information. You've completely missed the point. You're not asking the right questions...what has allowed it to be this cheap? Human genius is still powering the price-performance increase we are seeing, when human intelligence is not enough, it will evolve and grow along with the technology, hand-in-hand (or mind-in-mind).

The part you pointed out was directly about the amount of data we have now, as if the amount is all that important. It's important to know we have the capacity to store so much so cheaply, but is what we're storing really that important? That's the real question that needs answering. A data explosion isn't of much value if 99% of that explosion is garbage.

 

[scotpens]

. . . That's a lot of digital data, but it's nothing compared with what happened from 2003 through 2010: We created five exabytes of digital information every two days. Get ready for what's coming: By next year, we'll be producing five exabytes every 10 minutes.

And, to paraphrase Theodore Sturgeon, 90 percent of it will be crap.

Exactly. Cats were just as silly 200 years ago, just no one was taking pictures and writing captions about them...

But they were making some cute steel engravings.

(Okay, more like 150 years . . . close enough for horseshoes.)

 

[Crazy Eddie]

I'm starting to think lolcatz outnumbers porn on the internet.

It doesn't, as per Rule 34: somewhere on the internet there exists lolcatz porn.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

"Information" is a broad term. We're just texting and Tweeting, shooting a lot of HD video and pictures that require a lot of digital 1s and 0s to encode.

Txting and tweeting can often have valuable data in itself, as several dictators have discovered in recent years.

Yes, and the type of valuable data that used to be communicated by word of mouth or by hand-written notes tied to the ankles of homing pigeons now goes out through text messages. SSDD.

Most of the "information" you're referring to would be equivalent to graffiti, notes passed in a high school biology class, obscene messages on a bathroom wall and various random things normally said around a water cooler or while standing in line at the bus. The only difference is that the internet makes all that chatter searchable; it's not like it was never there before.

If we were audio-recording and videotaping every spoken word in the history of mankind, our output would be proportional to our population. If there is a real change here it's that a new medium of expression is encroaching on what has traditionally been a verbal medium, and this is not neccesarily a sign of progress (I am personally ashamed to belong to a species for whom "texting while driving" has actually become a public safety risk).

 

[YellowSubmarine]

It doesn't, as per Rule 34: somewhere on the internet there exists lolcatz porn.

No, lolcats are like irrational numbers: There's a lolcat between any two porn images, and there's porn between any two lolcats, but the lolcats outnumber the porn by a cardinality.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

I don't think so. I think porn pwns lolcatz.

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

This is advancement, I suppose, if one gets really stoned and thinks hard about it. Sober, OTOH, it doesn't signify much.