Info Overload: The Amount of Information in the World
“Computing capacity is increasing at 58% annually, telecommunications at 28%, and storage at 23% per year. The former rate is approximately the rate of Moore’s Law, a doubling every 18 months. Communications are doubling every 34 months and storage every 40 months. Information has been expanding at this rate for the past decade.”
More readngs:
A February 2011 article called The World’s Technological Capacity to Store, Communicate, and Compute Information (PDF here) by Martin Hilbert and Priscila Lopez.
“The full scale of how much information we make is hard to appreciate. We humans collectively now have capacity to store approximately 300 exabytes of information. This is close the total amount of information stored in one person’s DNA. Or, as Hilbert puts it, it’s the equivalent of 80 Library of Alexandrias per person on the planet. And remember, the technium is doubling its capacity every year and a half, and your DNA is not. Broadcasting has grown at about the same speed as world’s GDP; but our information storage capacity has grown 4 times faster and telecommunication capacity has grown roughly 5 times faster than the world’s economic power.”
Stephen
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Interesting. I’m currently reading Gleick’s The Information, where he suggests (asserts, really) that the entire universe can be understood as primarily information, not as energy or matter. When considered in that light, talking about an information explosion makes humans seem kinda cheeky..