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Will the Information age ever be superceded?
electricitylikesme
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
I would characterize the present time as the Information Age.
The success of Google and social media websites and the rise of "cloud" computing has led to a centralization and increase in data storage on a scale that surpasses all previous history. More importantly though, it's led to a massive opening up of information - an emphasis on data mining and correlation of all types of data ranging from traffic data to gene sequences to this guys kid's first word. (seriously, if you haven't seen this TED talk, watch it).
It's this activity -- in fact this seeming global obsession at the moment -- that I would say characterizes this as the Information age. We're collecting, cataloging and managing information on an enormous scale, as one of the single largest growing economic activities. Want to get rich quick? Find a way for people - everyone, everywhere - to share information somehow in some new way.
My question is: will this age ever end, or is it the last age? Is there a meaningful age which could possibly supercede the information age?
I tend to think yes - obviously. There's a lot we haven't yet done, and we're likely to hit diminishing returns on raw information gathering fairly soon. It seems likely to me that somewhere down the line the Artificial Intelligence age is a logical evolution of the Information age, but I don't think it will be the next thing that we all get excited about.
I'd say there are probably two possibilities: an actual Space Age, driven by the asteroid mining folks proving it's worthwhile and everyone else then getting in on the game. A "gold rush" of companies and governments targeting easy rare metals from asteroids, and then the subsequent infrastructure boom in Earth orbit, might make that an actual awesome thing that happens rather then the wither that was the moon landings and 2001 - but I wouldn't have believed it till a few months ago, and it depends on whether its proven.
The other is the Terraforming Age, and this I think is more likely. We're still damaging the environment - and if climate change starts impacting farmland, then we're going to need to get into terraforming in a big way, since making new farmland out of nothing will suddenly be literally the most important thing you can do. In a similar vein to the above, I think you could see a big shift with people getting into serious terraforming - as opposed to agribusiness - to restore, repair and manage lands.
Of course, neither of these two is mutually exclusive, and one may follow or be triggered by the other, but I guess what I'm asking is what do you see the future zeitgeist of economics being?
The success of Google and social media websites and the rise of "cloud" computing has led to a centralization and increase in data storage on a scale that surpasses all previous history. More importantly though, it's led to a massive opening up of information - an emphasis on data mining and correlation of all types of data ranging from traffic data to gene sequences to this guys kid's first word. (seriously, if you haven't seen this TED talk, watch it).
It's this activity -- in fact this seeming global obsession at the moment -- that I would say characterizes this as the Information age. We're collecting, cataloging and managing information on an enormous scale, as one of the single largest growing economic activities. Want to get rich quick? Find a way for people - everyone, everywhere - to share information somehow in some new way.
My question is: will this age ever end, or is it the last age? Is there a meaningful age which could possibly supercede the information age?
I tend to think yes - obviously. There's a lot we haven't yet done, and we're likely to hit diminishing returns on raw information gathering fairly soon. It seems likely to me that somewhere down the line the Artificial Intelligence age is a logical evolution of the Information age, but I don't think it will be the next thing that we all get excited about.
I'd say there are probably two possibilities: an actual Space Age, driven by the asteroid mining folks proving it's worthwhile and everyone else then getting in on the game. A "gold rush" of companies and governments targeting easy rare metals from asteroids, and then the subsequent infrastructure boom in Earth orbit, might make that an actual awesome thing that happens rather then the wither that was the moon landings and 2001 - but I wouldn't have believed it till a few months ago, and it depends on whether its proven.
The other is the Terraforming Age, and this I think is more likely. We're still damaging the environment - and if climate change starts impacting farmland, then we're going to need to get into terraforming in a big way, since making new farmland out of nothing will suddenly be literally the most important thing you can do. In a similar vein to the above, I think you could see a big shift with people getting into serious terraforming - as opposed to agribusiness - to restore, repair and manage lands.
Of course, neither of these two is mutually exclusive, and one may follow or be triggered by the other, but I guess what I'm asking is what do you see the future zeitgeist of economics being?
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A major global catastrophe would end the nice thing we have going, too; a big nuclear exchange or even something that wasn't anyone's "fault" like a large meteor strike could easily set us back a few hundred years.
Actually I think scrambling to deal with the effect of global warming in the coming century, humanity will come up with some pretty impressive geoengineering technologies we can't even dream of today
Also: once our oil wells dry up, we'll see a lot of inventions that will significantly reduce the amount of oil needed to - for example- make plastics or make container ships sail the world.
One invention I'm looking forward to is more efficient energy storage in small devices: imagine the kind of stuff we can pull off if we can make batteries that last years instead of days.
Or portals.
Yeah, the Space Age and Terraforming Age is just the glass half full side of coin. We could end up with a Nuclear Age, a Second Ice Age, or the classic Age of the Zombie.
See... I don't really know if we are ever going to get there on the nanoscale, but up in space where there is free hard vacuum and 24/7 solar power and everything is in freefall, we will probably be able to do the whole self organizing thing on the macroscale.
That is a lot simpler and can pretty much be done with our current technology. Robot miners feeding automated refineries sending supplies to autonomous factories(which build robot miners and factory construction bots).
We still get to break a decently size boot off in scarcity's ass, but without the need for quite so much magic.
Whatever our next big advancement is, we'll name it after that or we'll name it after a big event.
Probably something nanotech if I had to guess.
and the gengars who are guiding me" -- W.S. Merwin
We've left them behind in all the other ones.
I never asked for this.
This seems like a pretty compelling reason to get on with the space/terraforming age. It would be very nice if there was some sort of "backup drive" for all of human advancement. If a meteor just creams Earth, our accumulated knowledge would still exist "offsite", as it were.
biofuel.
and the gengars who are guiding me" -- W.S. Merwin
Perhaps the next age will be the Global Age, as we become more connected and the developing world starts interacting with the rest of us on a more equal footing?
It's like how the current literary "age" is called Post Modernism or even, when academics are at their most insufferable, Post Post Modernism. The idea that we're on some summit of civilization instead on a rise is laughable.
We've run out of essential knowledge to transfer and now we've lost all track of the purpose of communication
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
Another possibility is a Diamond Age where manufacturing technology becomes sufficiently inexpensive, miniaturized, and simplified to so anyone could own a device (ranging in size from a large printer to a refrigerator) that can produce any consumer electronic device they want at the same quality as a factory-made device. This would upend a lot of the current economic organization of the world, at least as far as manufacturing goes. There would still be a huge need for factories which produce the raw materials which work as the inputs of these personal fabricators, and for any object which was too large or complicated to produce from a fabricator. However, anything else would effectively be able to be sold like digital media.
Yet another is an Automation Age: a general-purpose AI is developed to the level where it can handle complex changes on the fly in a wide range of environments. The areas this would be seen in are: self-piloted vehicles [cars, buses, highway freight, commuter aircraft], fast-food, another good chunk of hand-made manufacturing, QA, general scientific research & corporate R&D, phone-based services (emergency services/911, customer service, etc - think Watson, but more adaptable).
Of course there's also the implications of what would come about if we fully mastered cellular biology, which is a pretty tall order. Such a development could lead to biological immortality (people only die from accidents, which I think meant the average lifespan was something like 1400 years just based on statistical likelihood of certain forms of accidental death), improved geo-engineering and teraforming, and potentially uplifted species depending on how ethical it was seen to be.
In terms of photography, the late-90s to the mid-2000s are going to be a mini Dark Age. Working on the inside of the publishing industry, I know a ton of images were lost simply because the switch to digital and the cost of data storage were out of sync long enough for professionals to get in the practice of mass deleting everything when the hard drives got too full, or backing up on proprietary things like Zip drives or floppies that have huge failure rates.
My guess would be the real "Space Age" would be next. But we kinda blew it with the name use, so it'd have to take a new mantle. But the core principals would be the same; reaching out to our solar system in a more practical means. Asteroid drilling would definitely be a thing, Ceres could maybe serve as a supply depot, and really even mining on Mars could be a thing (if there's anything for us to use there).
The age of terraforming though, I don't see that as being a part of it. At that point, we'd probably have a means to get galactic (as a species), and it'd very much be its own era. And it'd be a longass one.
Type something into google, and you'll get thousands of fake results, whose only purpose is to attract advertising dollars or spread malware. If you're searching for something restricted, the fakes are orders of magnitude more common.
Lets assume that these tenancies will scale; the more people use information, the more motivation there will be to spread fake information, or do damage using the free spread of information. An internet of fake, false, or fraudulent information can become (or maybe already is) bigger than the "legit" internet. It becomes harder to sort if things are decentralized, as you don't know exactly who to trust. Centralized sources become prime targets for subversion.
Money is a motivation for this sort of behavior, but I think politics is an even bigger one. There are an awful lot of powerful people who stand to lose a lot should less powerful groups become better able to communicate and organize amongst themselves, which if course is practically what the internet is for. Surveillance, censorship, copyright law, fraud. All of these things pose dangers do these wonderful networks that we inhabit. I don't think it likely at all for it to all go down the tube, but I don't think an ever lasting digital golden age is too likely either.
except that google and bing and the like only exist because they're useful. If that became the norm, people would stop using them and create new ones. That's the beauty of the intertubes.
Very true. But any system that algorithmically finds what you're looking for can be subverted, at least partially. You get an arms race kind of thing going. Anecdotally, google seems to kinda suck these days, for these reasons. If anyone knows a better search engine I'm all ears.
Bing works well enough and isn't a primary target at the moment.
There will always be a perpetual arms race. Just gotta anticipate it as much as possible.
A good point.
Dear Google seems to be betraying its Don't Be Evil model pretty frequently lately, but yeah I've had good results with Bing.
I don't have this experience at all. Google is exponentially better than it was, and better than every other search engine has been so far.
A lot of this is the fact that people are blind to how much better things are now than they were just a few years ago.
Look at wikipedia. It has grown to become nearly a legitimate source of information. This isn't because people's standards have become more lax, but because wikipedia has become more rigorous. The more people care, the harder they regulate. If I want to know something, I can know it, almost instantaneously. I'll admit there's an arms race, but more people are interested in getting correct information than are concerned with deceiving others (because even the deceivers are going to need information themselves).
Wikipedia is great, definately. They have their own problems, but those are mostly about how it is organized. I used to edit all the time, but its super cliquey now and hard to break in without sinking a lot of time in.
Google is still very good for a lot of things, but not everything. Topics where advertising is the most pervasive I find they fall behind. More and more lately my desired results haven't been on the first page, nor have they been find-able at all. I used to use all sorts of tricks to find things, using quotation marks, and carefully removing words from my search, mostly. But these ad sites apparently have learned these tricks too.
...but will I search the internet through a microsoft service? It seems so wrong. Funny how they're an underdog these days.
How does that relate to the discussion? Manufacturers adding this kind of capability to devices could extend data mining even further. Some examples: How many eggs are consumed in households in zip code xxxxx in a week? At what rate are they being consumed? Are they being used at the same time as several other items, and are users pulling up recipes while doing this? Exactly *which* devices are consuming power at peak usage times? How is market penetration progressing for product y? What is the average amount of time that toy z is being used in its active state?
I actually have this strongly optimistic belief that at some point we'll go all Jurassic Park, not for dinosaurs, no, but for a great many of the animals we've made extinct over the last century or so, as part of our eventual terraforming renaissance. Another part of me has to admit about all the ecosystem feedback shenanigans reintroducing various critters would likely do, but, maybe that'll be the easiest part to figure out, after learning how to resurrect lost species.
It might be somewhat sappy, but I really believe it is important for us to prove to ourselves we can bring back the things we've taken away.