bmac's Journal: value of information (1)

With Moore's Law plugging away for some 30+ years now, we are seeing a severe devaluation of information. Now that we have 200+ gig hard drives and ~5 gig writable dvd-roms, the amount of information that you can *personally* own is absurdly large.

People have already started suggesting systems being capable of storing a person's entire personal experience. Beyond the absurdity of such a self-important endeavor, this is actually pointing towards a completely new value of information.

The use of mass media 100 yrs ago entailed the use of the newspaper to imprint upon the informationless masses what, to a more cynical eye, amounts to propaganda. Of course, sometimes altruism prevailed and an objective truth was attempted to be conveyed.

Then came radio, then live video via tv, then recorded analog video, now digital video.

This entire path was forged by the actual invention of written language which, as an information spreading medium, was hampered by the need to manually copy texts. Of course Guttenburg changed all of that, yet the information was still very expensive and with high levels of illiteracy still constituted very much a secret society.

Now? We could, on just a handful of dvd's, store all the texts on science and math such that with a careful study guide, PhD level competetancy could be achieved at one's own pace.

Distributed education, anyone? Sounds like a wiki path to me.

After a few more cycles of Moore's Law we will be approaching, should it continue, Terabyte capacity. Sure the bandwith-to-storage rate might lag behind, but I reckon it'll still be good enough for access.

I *love* M-W.COM, good old Merrium-Webster (the dictionary). One nextgen dvd will be able to contain an absurdly complete unabridged dictionary.

A couple of generations later a small stack of dvd's is the nextgen encyclopedia. And this ain't no Britanica, at least not as I knew it as a kid. What would have been a five page precis of a topic will be a hierarchically organized window that goes from precis on the surface to organized course itinerary to achieve competance or even mastery, complete with *full* reference material.

Now, the effects of devaluation? We have already been experiencing the effects of its beginnings in that jobs from 15-20 yrs ago that were pure information processing jobs have disappeared. No more middle managers, because *software* and their data goes directly from lowest tier to management. No more pencil pushers. This is *not* good news for the economy (in the short term), yet we are perhaps only mid-way through the cycle, a cycle that is exponential in its progress, though.

What's next? Entire types of businesses are going to disappear due to the relentless, reckless and uncaring forces of capitalism. Amazon is destroying local bookstores and record shops. Add to this the formation of new and for-free efforts of civicly-minded groups of individuals aggregating information for use by the net and we are slip-sliding *down* the exponential curve of the devaluation of information.