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design of the internet of everything, and the nature of the cloud that it floats in, is to track data. The 34 billion internet-enabled devices we expect to add to the cloud in the next five years are built to stream data. And the cloud is built to keep the data. Anything touching this cloud that is able to be tracked will be tracked.
The fastest-increasing quantity on this planet is the amount of information we are generating.
Two economists at UC Berkeley tallied up the total global production information and calculated that new information is growing at 66 percent per year.
Metadata is the new wealth because the value of bits increases when they are linked to other bits. The least productive life for a bit is to remain naked and alone. A bit uncopied, unshared, unlinked with other bits will be a short-lived bit.
The worst future for a bit is to be parked in some dark isolated data vault. What bits really want is to hang out with other related bits, be replicated widely, and maybe become a metabit, or an action bit in a piece of durable code. If we could personify bits, we’d say:
Science fiction author David Brin calls this the “Transparent Society,” which is also the name of his 1999 book summing up the idea.
If I prefer to remain private and opaque to potential friends and institutions, then I must accept I will be treated generically, without regard to my specific particulars. I’ll be an average number.
The next level up is peta. Petabytes are the new normal for companies. Exabytes are the current planetary scale. We’ll probably reach zetta in a few years. Yotta is the last scientific term for which we have an official measure of magnitude. Bigger than yotta is blank. Until now, any more than a yotta was a fantasy not deserving an official name. But we’ll be flinging around yottabytes in two decades or so.
Entirely new industries have sprung up in the last two decades based on the idea of unbundling.
Data scientists call this stage “machine readable” information, because it is AIs and not humans who will do this work in the zillions.
Everyone “knew” that people don’t work for free, and if they did, they could not make something useful without a boss. But today entire sections of our economy run on software instruments created by volunteers working without pay or bosses.
One day in the next three decades the entire internet/phone system will blink off for 24 hours, and we’ll be in shock for years afterward.
Most of what “everybody knows” about human beings has so far been based on the human individual. But there may be a million different ways to connect several billion people, and each way will reveal something new about us.
mathematicians will tell you, the widening gap between two exponential curves is itself an exponential curve. That gap between questions and answers is our ignorance, and it is growing exponentially. In other words, science is a method that chiefly expands our ignorance rather than our knowledge.
no one would have believed 30 years ago that there was an $82 billion business in answering people’s questions for cheap or for free.
Answers become cheap and questions become valuable—the inverse of the situation now.
