Future of Information
What is information? What is it good for? What is its market value, and how much does it cost to produce? What are the drawbacks of faulty information? Is information subject to laws or other restrictions? Should it be?
None of these questions are trivial to answer, but I’d like to encourage you to look at them from what may be a new viewpoint for you. Consider this: During the Stone Age, how did people collect and disperse information? They used environmental cues (weather, smells), and later peoples had some form of communication amongst themselves, most likely grunts or pictograms. All information storage was either in their minds, or scrawled somewhere on a cave wall.
Fast forward several thousand years, to the days of the first widespread written languages (e.g. when paper was invented). In addition to recording information on a flexible and reasonably durable medium, paper allowed information to be circulated like never before. At this point, information storage had expanded to all sorts of manually-recordable mediums, such as wood and stone carvings.
Fast forward again to around 1450, right after the invention of the printing press. For the first time (or at least what I think was the first time — I’m not a history major 
), information did not have to be manually created or copied; there were methods of quickly recording information based on a “mold” that already existed. Information could not only be stored simply by having one copy of whatever needed to be printed, but it could be disseminated many times faster. The development of interchangeable parts in the late 18th century brought this same “mold” capability to various types of mass production.
With the widespread use of electricity and the advances in electromechanics during the early-to-mid 20th century, people found efficient ways not only to gather, spread and store information, but also to disguise it. Encryption (think “really advanced code”) had been around for thousands of years, but especially with the World Wars, militants needed ways to convey messages without fear of interception. The advances in information technology during this time period were countless — telephone, radio, and phonograph, just to name a few.
From the late 20th century through the present day, we’ve seen numerous breakthroughs in the ways we store, use and transmit information, most of those breakthroughs coming along with (or due to) advancements in digital electronics. In the most advanced countries, we can carry a cellular phone, MP3 player, video player, organizer, and all-around-cool-gadget in one palm-sized package. It’s not uncommon to see computer hard drives with storage rates on the terabyte level. (Just ten years ago, 10GB would have been very large — now I can easily carry that on my all-around-cool-gadget.) You know that encryption that the military used a few decades ago? It’s now in everything from your HDTV to your iPod, and it’s known as DRM.
I could go on and on, but it’s time to get to my first point: The costs of producing, transmitting and storing information are dropping substantially, and will continue to do so. That’s fairly obvious, but nonetheless important. And yes, I say “first point” because there is indeed a second one…
Let’s briefly visit our friends back in the Stone Age. If little Pebbles Flintstone wants to keep her deepest, darkest secrets hidden from Bamm-Bamm Rubble, what does she need to do? Not tell him, obviously, but let’s simplify this; in how many ways could Bamm-Bamm discover these secrets? Assuming he doesn’t know any secrets exist, his only chance of discovering them would be for Pebbles to make some mistake (e.g. leave her stone-carved diary out for him to find). If she wanted to tell someone who wasn’t Bamm-Bamm, she would merely have to make sure that Bamm-Bamm wasn’t around. In other words, it’s very easy for Pebbles to protect this information.
Until very recently, we all enjoyed mostly the same privacies as Pebbles. If we wanted to protect information, we could do it by transmitting it privately, by transmitting it securely (via encryption), or by never transmitting it at all. However, the last several years have witnessed advances in digital cracking and reverse engineering that have not truly been surpassed by our encryption abilities (just Google for “HD-DVD key” for some recent examples). Additionally, societies (America, the UK, and China in particular) are becoming increasingly lax about privacy rights; cameras watch our every move in some public places, and even your Web browser isn’t safe from prying “eyes”.
The costs of producing, transmitting and storing information are dropping substantially, and will continue to do so… but the costs of protecting that information are skyrocketing, such that protection will eventually cease to exist.
Think about that for a second. With any commodity in the world, what happens when its production and maintenance costs plummet and it becomes so widespread that anybody can easily obtain it? Its value drops to zilch — and that’s exactly what’s going to happen with information. When and if quantum storage becomes a reality, we will be able to store massive amounts of information in miniscule amounts of space. (I saw an article, I don’t remember where, that suggested something like the entire sum of all human knowledge [basically, every person's life in high-def video format, and then some] in a closet-sized area.) At some point in time, there is a distinct possibility that every person will have a long-distance transmitter embedded in his brain, which will instantize information transmission (and make almost every other form of real-time communication obsolete).
I don’t claim to be a futurist, and I have no idea when this “Information Explosion” is going to happen. It could be during our lifetime; it probably won’t. However, I would put a large amount of stock into the prediction that, sooner or later, the value of information as we know it will drop to virtually nothing — and that may be a good thing or a bad thing. Next time, I’ll discuss what exactly all of this means. Until then, just keep trying to wrap your head around it. It may take awhile.
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