Kevin Kelly -- The Technium - 0 views
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The fastest growing entity today is information. Information is expanding ten times faster than the growth of any other manufactured or natural product on this planet. According to a calculation Hal Varian, an economist at Google, and I made, world-wide information has been increasing at the rate of 66% per year for many decades. Compare that explosion to the rate of increase in even the most prolific manufactured stuff – like concrete, or paper -- which averages only 7% annually over decades.
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Mike Chelen on 03 Oct 08What Mr. Kelly should say is that the amount of information which is measured is growing quickly. It is not possible to know all of the information available, however it is still important that the amount which we successfully record, store, and access is increasing.
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Surely the number of web pages is increasing, but how well does the number of web pages measure information? Perhaps actual network bandwidth usage, or total filesizes, would be a better measure?
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The number of scientific articles published each year has been increasing in a steady rise for more than 50 years. Over the last 150 years the number of patent applications has increased. By this rough metric, knowledge is growing exponentially.
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The fastest growing entity today is information. Information is expanding ten times faster than the growth of any other manufactured or natural product on this planet. According to a calculation Hal Varian, an economist at Google, and I made, world-wide information has been increasing at the rate of 66% per year for many decades. Compare that explosion to the rate of increase in even the most prolific manufactured stuff - like concrete, or paper -- which averages only 7% annually over decades.
