In order to better illustrate this, let’s go bottoms-up. Don’t worry, it’s not long.
[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Evolution"]
[/caption]The first step is to recognize the nature of information and understand the meaning associated with it. That’s very basic stuff and has already been dealt with extensively by B. F. Skinner, Noam Chomsky and other socio- and psycholinguistics. The science associated with it tends to be largely abstracted and deductive; let’s just say it has something to do with the way babies learn languages and about what’s already hardwired into the human brain without having us to feed it with anything else.
The second step is to understand the different kinds of information. This process is dependent substantially on the feedback loop within the human brain, and that involves sentience and self-consciousness. Therefore, as soon as it became apparent that man understood the difference between himself and the monkey sitting opposite him, it also became apparent that at some point of time, he learned to use his five senses to receive and process information – and in the process, know what information is in itself by separately identifying periods during which he did or didn’t have it.
The third step is to access any bit of information irrespective of its large-scale availability. Silly as this may sound, this step can be broken down into a couple of sub-processes: identification, classification and recollection. If I see (identification) a new shoe in a display window, I classify it as “funky” and “of some interest to me” (classification). The next time I’m out shopping or my friend’s asking me for some advice on footwear, I’ll point him to this shoe I saw some time ago (recollection). It’s been dumbed down just to make a quick point; this same sequence happens on much faster and much larger scales every time we take a walk outside or go to work.
The fourth step is to acquire information. There’s a big difference between acquiring something and receiving something. If you receive it, it’s dropped into your hand whether you’ve asked for it or not. If you acquire it, you’ve gone after it: you’ve done more than just have an open palm. This step involves the cumulative efforts put into the first three steps – recognition, understanding, classification, recollection – along with a fifth factor: utility. In order to go after it and make it your own, you need to able to quantify information and then filter out what you need out of all that there is.
Now that that’s sorted out, let’s take a look at where we are in the space-time continuum: space-wise, we are where we started off, but time-wise, we’re must closer to the “future” than we ever were. Ever since its conception and inception, technology has been man’s slave, so there was only so much time left before it satiated all of our present needs and moved on to simulate the future – a crossover that may have happened sometime after the invention of the transistor: from need to want.
[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Lost?"]
[/caption]At this juncture, we’re clearly quite beyond the idea that we need to go after information in order to have any idea what’s going on. All you need to do is sit still these days and the information will still reach your ears, your eyes, and given enough time, your nose, too (give it more time, and “the man who’s been sitting still” will become info that you’ve generated). What’s more important is to be able to filter out the data we seek the most. However, what’s most important is to understand the evolution of information keeping in mind that its future is also here.
The structuralization of information is complete. What we have before us is a unit cell, and what’s left for us to do is understand the different lattices it can concatenate itself into. In physics, there’s such a thing called the degrees of freedom. Simply put, an object that can move about in N dimensions has N(N +1)/2 degrees of freedom. So, throw time into the loop, and we have ten degrees of freedom. In the future, information is definitely going to be the fifth degree of freedom – but not necessarily giving us 15 different ways to move about. That was just to give you an idea how much this world’s going to shrink.
Wars are going to become easier to fight: all you have to do is hijack the information dissemination systems of a country you're planning to attack about two years in advance and make it harder to receive, process and utilize any information by putting in place sanctions and embargoes. Voila! In three years' time from 2011, you'll be at 2014 while your enemy's going to be in 2012, and when science and tech. are practically racing each other for all the money in the world, you might as well be millennia ahead of the sod. However, that also means the peace is going to be (somehow) easier to keep.
Information volumes are going to increase, if they already aren't, and not erratically. Their growth rate is going to be dependent mostly on some parameter X, and lesser on some Y and Z. It’s not like I know what they are and am holding them back – it’s just that it’s going to become harder and harder to identify the Xs, the Ys and the Zs on an absolute scale because they’re going to vary from person to person, from country to country in the worst cases. If you think that’s surprising, you’re an idiot. The easier you make it for the people to access any information, the more you’re enabling them to move into the future, a world of “do more, do better”.
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