Exponential Growth. People who know me will have seen this before but<br>I&#3...

Julian Bond - 2011-08-21 16:40:35+0000 - Updated: 2011-08-21 16:40:35+0000

Exponential Growth. People who know me will have seen this before but
I'd like you to absorb it, understand it and get it deep inside your
thinking. Grok deep my friends. The human brain seems to have a hard
time understanding exponential growth as our natural tendency (perhaps
hard wired) is to build mental models of the world for prediction where
the future is more or less like the past. Let me show you why that is
mistaken.

Jan 2009
Let's take all the information and knowledge in the world in Jan 2009
and give it a value of one. That's all of recorded human thought created
since deep in pre-history.

Feb 2010
It took about 13 months for the total information in the world to
double. That means that pre 2009 is now 50% of the total.

Feb 2011
The pace of growth is accelerating. 2010 was the first year that the
doubling period was just less than 12 months. So in Feb 2011 there is 4
times the information that there was in Jan 2009. Or to put it another
way Pre-2009 is now only 25% of the total.

Jan 2012
You can see where this is going. We're now down to doubling in 11
months. A value of 8. Pre 2009 is now only 12.5% of the total

Nov 2012 [1]
We just hit 16. That's 16 times as much information as in Jan 2009. Pre-
2009 is now only 6.25% of the current total. All that old print hasn't
gone away and it can still be found. But it's rapidly being forgotten as
it's buried by what's been created in the last 4 years.

It gets more complicated. Long term storage is not expanding as fast as
the growth in new information. So we're actually forgetting faster than
ever before as well. The limit to what we can usefully remember and pay
attention to in the past is accelerating towards our present. And in
front of us the future is getting closer and closer to us. The rate of
change means that useful predictions of what it might be like are
unstable and the point where that happens is coming closer.

Back in the 50s you could be reasonably sure that the world in 2.5 years
time would be pretty much the same as it was 2.5 years ago. "Now" was
about 5 years long. Today, we're lucky if "Now" is 5 months long.

The Past is forgotten, The Future is uncertain, Now is short.

Exponential growth is all around us. The BRIC countries' GDP is growing
at 10% long term. Much of Africa is growing at 5%. Energy production and
usage, raw material usage, pollution generation are all following
roughly parallel paths.

But there's a big difference here. Information technology and
information generation are still a long way from any theoretical limit.
There's still an awful lot of people with an awfully long way to go till
they can become full time middle class knowledge workers. And that's
without factoring in the growth of machine generated information.

Energy, Raw Materials and Pollution have real limits and in lots of
cases that limit is only a few doubling periods away. In exponential
systems with a hard limit, you don't get an endless hockey stick curve,
you get an S Curve as the limit constraint begins to have an effect and
things like increasing costs dampen the demand. But even that isn't
smooth and lots of models go into extremely chaotic behaviour rather
than any smooth peak. Another reason for thinking that the future is very uncertain.

[1]Yes, I know. I'm a month early for the Dec 2012 singularity. But
although a lot of these ideas were prompted by Terence McKenna and RA
Wilson, it doesn't seem to be happening quite as fast as they thought it
might.

46-71 Trinity Rd, Ware, Hertfordshire SG12 7

Stef Kunzer - 2011-08-21 16:57:47+0000

Interesting take on information and storage, especially "we're actually forgetting faster than ever before"

But there are two points that need to be taken into account:
1. The amount of information learned doesn't follow the exponential growth curve. So information taught still leans more heavily towards the past (I don't just mean history, but when that information was first known). The amount of information currently being learned that was known pre-2009 (for example) might be shrinking as a percentage, as new information comes along to replace it, but it's not shrinking as much as the curve for total information known.
2. Impact of information does not necessarily follow a curve in the same way, so, information pre-2009 (for example) may change behaviour more fundamentally than information currently being created/discovered.

The impact of this is, percentages noted as a percentage of total information known:
(A1) Amount of information already existing = 50%
(A2) Amount of new information created this year = 50%
(B1) Amount of information learned that existed pre-today = 80%
(B2) Amount of information learned discovered/created this year = 20%
(C1) Amount of information that impacts my life, that existed pre-this year = 70%
(C2) Amount of information that impacts my life discovered/created this year = 30%

Just examples, but whilst the A curve may well be exponential, the B curve will be much shallower, and the C curve shallower still. In other words, the future is far more predictable than the exponential curve you're suggesting.

Hypothetical and my opinion, but that doesn't make it wrong. Of course storage companies like Oracle and EMC will love this, and economists will probably hate it.

Pete Bennett - 2011-08-21 16:58:50+0000

I've always been struck by the rice/wheat and chessboard story. Wikipedia explains it well http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheat_and_chessboard_problem ... although I was a little disappointed that the total amount was a mere 1000x the global production, I thought it might be even more insane.

Julian Bond - 2011-08-21 17:08:50+0000 - Updated: 2011-08-21 17:19:35+0000

+Steve Kunzer Nicely put. I'm using the term information very, very loosely to make a point. Perhaps I should have called it Data. 2 examples. I have friends at CERN who work on statistical analysis of the output of the LHR. The quantity of data being generated by that thing is mind boggling. 2nd one. Human Genome Sequencing is getting faster and faster and again that and genomics in general is producing staggering amounts of data. But neither of those impact directly on us as humans or affect our ability to remember the past or predict the future except by their by-products.

And as Gibson said, the future isn't evenly distributed. Live hand to mouth on a farm and life is fairly predictable. Even when the Monsanto salesman knocks on the door.

Julian Bond - 2011-08-21 17:19:17+0000

+Pete Bennett I lean more towards Bucky Fuller than Malthus. There's always a technical/social fix when dis-satisfaction with the status quo reaches a high enough level. As long as we don't get too greedy, the whole world can live quite happily on bread, pea soup and the occasional steak. But there's a lot of greed and envy out there. And that's going to make the transition from 4*4 to bread/pea soup/steak pretty messy. Even if for most people the 4*4 is not an Escalade but a Tata Nano.

Pete Bennett - 2011-08-21 17:41:30+0000

mmmmm...steak...;-)

Stu Fleming - 2011-08-21 19:33:57+0000

we also seem to have an inability to comprehend logarithmic curves, where a doubling of one quantity for example, leads to a linear increase in another. but we are starting to see the limits of exponential growth and that has massive implications for economies based on deficit spending

Ron Watson - 2011-09-26 09:57:28+0000

Great post here. I do think a bit more emphasis should be placed on the 2009 base.

That 1 that you break it down to is all information from human history to that point. Thousands of years of information. Every book, every pamphlet, every commercial, advertisement, personal correspondence, religious sermon, etc.

Then in 12 months, all of that information from human history, has doubled, we generated 5000 years of human information in 1 year.

This is really important with natural resources like Oil, where each time we double (10 years of 7% growth, iirc) it is the equivalent of all oil pulled out of the ground to that point. It's just staggering. Pollution, waste and depletion are terrible as well.

Thanks again for sharing and then hitting me with the link.
Peace~

Kevin Bjorke - 2011-09-27 16:39:02+0000

Information usefully understood before 2009: 10%. Information usefully understood in November 2012: 0.65% (allowing generously for the idea that people may have actually gotten smarter over those three years)