The billion dollar information problem

For all of history, humans have created technology ensuring information is easier to generate, transfer and archive. These technologies, more than any others, shape the history of mankind.

The invention of language, then writing, papyrus, the printing press, computers, the internet and so on are examples of information technologies, and in many ways, religions too, which is fascinating, but somewhat out of scope for this article.

Every single one of these technologies start a MASSIVE transformation in the way society operates. This is not surprising, after all, information processing is what distinguishes humans from other animals, and therefore, anything you see humans do that other animals don’t, or do to a limited extent, is the byproduct of information technologies.

From the massive printing of pamphlets leading to the protestant revolution within Christianity, to the telegraph during the civil war or the enigma machine, information technologies have been the doing and undoing of empires.

Humans use their attention to acquire information and process it. The amount of attention one is capable of is variable, but certainly limited.

As humans produce, share and archive information at an exponentially growing pace, we are bound to reach a point where nobody has enough attention to process the amount of information available.

If we quickly go back to the time of Newton for instance, it is conceivable that someone could read most if not all the scientific papers published. In fact, the challenge wouldn’t be to read and understand the papers, but rather to be able to get access to them. In such an environment, access is key. In addition, someone powerful could easily ensure that the copies of some document disappear to make it virtually impossible for pretty much anyone to access it.

This state of affairs leads to a strong culture of free speech in western countries and an age of unprecedented wealth creation. The first amendment in the USA’s constitution, or articles 10 and 11 of the déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen in France are very clear on the matter. Most western countries share these values.

These values aren’t simply written on paper. The population of western countries have been reminded of how precious they are on a regular basis since then, and how they must be defended. In the internet era, many debates on net neutrality, or the role of large social media platforms are proof that the population, at least the portion of it that value freedom, remain very concerned by the protection of free speech.

But something happened to most of us somewhere between 2000 and 2010, depending on our exposure to the latest information technologies: our attention became shorter than the amount of information we are exposed to.

The framework laid out by our ancestors is close to useless in this world. They lived in an information scarce world, where it was paramount to ensure everybody had access to information, even bad information. The problem we are facing is about extracting meaning in a sea of information that has become so deep it might as well be bottomless.

As I’m writing this, Donald Trump, as well as numerous other conservative personalities, were banned from =Twitter, Facebook, and numerous other platforms on a move that is qualified by many as censorship. But is it?

These people still have numerous options to publish whatever they wish — for instance on their own websites — , to share and discuss these publications — for instance on gab, parler or minds — , and there are many more solution for whatever else they would want to do.

Yet, there is no doubt that this will hurt the visibility of their message, possibly in a crippling fashion. The reason isn’t censorship, it is because nobody has the available attention bandwidth to check twitter, parler, minds, gab, facebook and the thousands of things happening in their life.

These people are not censored, they are being drowned in a sea of noise.

The billion dollar problem that remains to be solved is as follows: how does one extract the meaningful information, while reducing the noise to a minimum, from the endless stream of data available to us.

Whoever can solve this problem will undoubtedly change the world in a way that will undo empires, shift the balance of power and will be noted as a major turn in the history books. Or, will books still exist then?