Group items tagged

printing broadcast them

Calendars and other scripts captured abstractions such as time, or music

scientific method in the 17th century was a series of deepening organizational techniques

Data was first measured, then recorded, analyzed, forecasted and disseminated

The wide but systematic exchange of information via wires, radio waves and society meetings upped the complexity of information flowing through the technium

Innovations in communications (phonograph, telegraph, television) sped up the rate of coordination, and also added new levels of systemization

paper was a more permanent memory device than the brain; photographic film even better. Cheap digital chips lowered the barrier for storing ephemeral information, further intensifying the density of informatio

Highly designed artifacts and materials are atoms stuffed with layers of complex information. The most mechanical superstructures we've ever built - say skyscrapers, or the Space Shuttle, or the Hadron Supercollider — are giant physical manifestations of incredibly structured information

the two greatest inventions in the last 25 years, the link and the tag, have woven new levels of complexity into the web of information

The technium of today reflects 8,000 years of almost daily incremental increases in its embedded knowledge.

Every one of the 30 million or so unique species of life on the planet today is an unbroken informational thread that traces back to the very first cell.

Geneticist Motoo Kimura estimates that the total genetic information accumulated since the Cambrian explosion 500 million years ago is 10 megabytes per genetic lineage.

One study estimated the earth harbored 10^30 single-cell microbes. A typical microbe, like a yeast, produces one one-bit mutation per generation, which means one bit of unique information for every organism alive. Simply counting the microbes alone (about 50% of the biomass), the biosphere contains 10^30 bits, or 10^29 bytes, or 10,000 yottabyes of genetic information.

Measured by the amount of digital storage in use, the technium today contains 487 exabytes (10^20) of information, many orders smaller than nature's total, but growing. Technology expands data by 66% per year, overwhelming the growth rates of any natural source.

the laws of physics don't (as far as we know) improve with time, but extropic systems like life, mind and the technium do. Over billions of years they gain order, complexity, and their own self-organized autonomy — all things not present in the universe before. As Paul Davies points out, "life as we observe it today is 1 percent physics and 99 percent history."

Our present economic migration from a material-based industry to a knowledge economy of intangible goods (such as software, design, and media products) is just the latest in a steady move towards the immaterial.

Forty percent of US exports today are services (intangibles) rather than manufactured goods (atoms). Disembodiment of value (more value, less mass) is a steady trend in the technium

Dematerialization is not the only way in which extropy advances. The technium's ability to compress information into highly refined structures is also a triumph of the immaterial.

Every scientific theory is in the end a compression of information. In this way, our libraries stacked with peer-reviewed, cross-indexed, annotated, equation-riddled journal articles are great mines of concentrated information.

the genome of a single living organism contains more information than required by all the laws of physics.

If you were to take all the known laws of physics, formulas such as f=ma, E=mc^2, S= K log W, and more complicated ones that describe how liquids flow, or objects spin, or electrons jump, and write them all down in one file, they would fit onto a single gigabyte CD disk.

Even if we currently know only 0.1% of the actual number of laws guiding universal processes, many of which we are undoubtedly still unaware of, and the ultimate file of physical laws was 1,000 times

Once scientists built large scopes to examine matter below the level of fleeting quarks and muons, they saw the world was incorporeal. They discovered that matter is, at the bottom, empty space and waves of quantum uncertainties.

All creation is assembled from irreducible bits. The bits are like the "atoms" of classical Greece: the tiniest constituent of existence. But these new digital atoms are the basis not only of matter, as the Greeks thought, but of energy, motion, mind, and life.

To date, computer scientists have been able to encapsulate every logical argument, scientific equation, and literary work that we know about into the basic notation of computation.

The second supposition is that all things can compute. Surprisingly almost any kind of material can serve as the matrix for a computer. Human brains, which are mostly water, compute fairly well.

The third postulate is: All computation is one.

The physics of person munching on a banana is computationally equivalent to the best possible virtual simulation of the same act. Both phenomenon require the same degree of universal computation, one in particles, and one in electrons.

The Turing-Church conjecture states that any computation executed by one computer with access to an infinite amount of storage, can be done by any other computing machine with infinite storage, no matter what its configuration

The consequence of these three propositions — that computation is universal, ubiquitous, and equivalent — suggests that the logical processing of bits is the most potent form of self-organization at work in the universe.

If everything can compute, and all computation is equivalent, then there is only one universal computer. All the human-made computation, especially our puny little PCs, merely piggyback on cycles of the Great Computer, also known as the Universe.

doctrine of universal computation means all existing things — the made, the found and the born — are linked to one another because they share, as John Wheeler said, "at the bottom — at a very deep bottom, in most instances — an immaterial source." This commonality, spoken of by mystics of many beliefs in different terms, also has a scientific name: information, computation, extropy.

Generally, a society does not abandon a new technology to return to an earlier version. When a current technology is suspended in the natural course of evolution it is usually displaced by a more complex variation, and the old version is swept aside as a viable minor alternative, or at least a curiosity, but rarely goes extinct.

Rather than a series of linear displacements climbing a ladder of evolution, the technium progresses as a widening field of accumulation.

Existing technologies keep operating almost intact, but are subsumed under additional new, more complex layers.

As any modern farmer will tell you, the glories of virtual worlds and e-commerce depend upon a rather primitive cycle of poking seeds into dirt and harvesting the replicants

For all practical purposes the flexibility of a technological system is eliminated once its initial choices and defaults are fixed. As systems scale up they acquire inertia.

The more established a process is, the harder it is to change, the more it proceeds along its path. Big technology is hard to stop.

This grid, built 100 years ago, lighted your grandparent's home, and our parents', and now brightens mine, and will light the lights of our grandchildren and probably their grandkids.

This technological longevity is almost a kind of immortality that transcends our comparatively brief lives. The technium's scope exists outside of our oversight, especially outside of our personal oversight. Its omnipresence together with its relative immortality grants it a version of autonomy.

The second way that technology gains a measure of autonomy is through its self-creation of needs.

It is this stratified stability created by extropy, evolution, and self-organization which prevents the collapse of complexity. If complexity had to re-assemble itself at every instance, nothing really complex would be possible.

The technium today is entirely populated with combinations of primitive technologies that have been ratcheted up into more complex devices.

Progress, even moral progress, is ultimately a human invention. It is a product of our wills and minds, and thus a technology.

Even counting vast tracks of agriculture, the technium entails fewer than one percent of the atoms on the Earth's land surface. Yet the impact which this minute fraction of technological mass and energy has on the planet is in far disproportion to its size. Measured by impact per gram or calorie, there is nothing comparable to things we invent. Technology is the most powerful force in the world.

But when we trace back the origins for each agent in a field of causes, we find that each strand leads to a newly introduced technology, a new idea.  That means that new technologies today will cast a long shadow into the future and shape the lives of our descendents.

"New technologies are never created from nothing." Arthur observed. "They are constructed—put together—from components that previously exist; and in turn these new technologies offer themselves as possible components—building blocks—for the construction of further new technologies."

(Not that material processing has let up, just that intangible processing is now more valuable.) In six years the average weight per dollar of US exports (the most valuable things the US produces) dropped by half.

Most people can appreciate how the essence of living things might be information and order. Information is vague enough to be similar to the idea of a "spirit." But if my hypothesis is true — that life is an extension of a 14 billion-year old inanimate autonomous order, one that now continues into the machines of technology — then this same spirit of information must reside at the core of the non-living world as well. Although it may not dominate matter's behavior, information must rest in the essence of matter. That's a lot less intuitive. When we bang a knee against a table leg, it sure doesn't feel like we knocked into information. But that's the idea many physicists are formulating.

One computer can do anything another can do. This is why your Mac can, with proper software, pretend to be a PC, or, with sufficient memory, a slow supercomputer. A Dell laptop could, if anyone wanted it to, emulate an iPhone.

In that curious way of life, growth triggers more growth. The web of technologies is ever expanding because a particular technology will self-generate new needs, new demands, and new appetites.

But where did this remarkable harvest of lawful order come from if it was not somehow "built into" that tiny file of physical laws? I claim that the trajectory of the technium was embedded into the fabric of matter and energy. If that is true, then one literal interpretation of that claim is that the 10^29 bytes of information now in the extropic realm were somehow dissolved into the one gigabyte of information of the physical laws, and unpacked over time. By the same logic, the dense leafy information displayed by a huge oak tree was previously dissolved into the microscopic informational packet of a tiny acorn, and unpacked over 80 years.

For instance in the age of automation, older hand tools are perfect for working off the grid, or in tight spots, or in countries with little cash. In an urban world, swords are hammered out by blacksmiths for ritual purposes. Quilts are sewn by hand for recreation and community. Fish are caught by hook for sport. Leather is used for the best shoes because the improvements on leather aren't really better. Commonly, the transition to the new appears faster than it is, as the old lingers invisibly behind the glittering flash of the new. For instance, despite the dominance of automobiles on modern culture today, more bicycles are sold each year than cars.

Now we have the net. While some alarmists claim that Google is making us stupid, in fact Google is making us smarter by again retraining our brains. In a  2009 study Gary Small used MRI scans to demonstrate that sustained internet searching among older adults bestowed their brains with a two-fold increase in activation in several major brain regions compared to non-internet users. Experience web surfers had a significant increase in activity  in controlling decision making, complex reasoning, and vision, including the frontal pole, anterior temporal region, and the hippocampus regions of the brain.

But not all changes induced by technology are magically positive. Industrial scale slavery, like that imposed upon Africa, was enabled by sailing ships which transported captives across oceans, and encouraged by the mechanical cotton gin which could cheaply process the fibers the slaves planted and harvested. Without technology, slavery at this massive scale would have been unknown. Thousands of  synthetic persistent toxins have caused mass disruptions of natural cycles in both humans and other species, a huge unwanted downside from small inventions. War is a particularly serious amplifier of the great negative powers brought by technology. Horrific weapons of destruction, capable of inflicting entirely new atrocities upon society, spring directly from the most powerful force in the world.  On the other hand, the remedies and offsets to the negative consequences also stem from this most powerful force. Local ethnic slavery was practiced by most earlier civilizations, and probably in prehistoric times as well, and still continues in sporadic remote areas; it's overall diminishment globally is due to the technological tools of communication, law, and education. Technologies of detection, and substitution, can remove the routine use of synthetic toxins. The technologies of monitoring, law, treaties, policing, courts, citizen media and economic globalism can temper, dampen, and in the long run diminish the vicious cycles of war.

Over time language also enabled information to be stored in a memory greater than an individual’s recall. A language-based culture accumulated stories and oral wisdom to disseminate to future generations. T

We inject order into everything we manufacture by designing it, but now we are also adding small microscopic chips that can perform small amounts of computation and communication. Even the smallest disposable item will share a small thin sliver of our collective mind.

No transition has affected our species, or the world at large, more than the creation of language. Indeed many would define humanity by its possession of true language. The informational aspects of language are now obvious.

We are in the midst of a movement where we embed information into all matter around us. We inject order into everything we manufacture by designing it, but now we are also adding small microscopic chips that can perform small amounts of computation and communication.

The invention of writing systems for language and math structured this learning even more. Ideas could be remembered more accurately, and just as importantly, their organization could be examined and analyzed. Ideas could also be indexed, retrieved, and propagated easier. Writing allowed the organization of information to penetrate into many aspects of life and vastly accelerated trade, creation of calendars, and laws – all of which organized information furthe