Upbeat report on the Information Big Bang (from my broker)
"We recently spent an afternoon in Massachusetts with the folks at EMC2
(including CEO Mike Ruettgers), a global leader in storage technology.
What we heard and saw (we toured a couple R&D labs) was mind boggling
and profound.
For years we have been trying to come to grips with the storage
requirements associated with the tsunami of information produced on the
planet. Fortunately for us, Mr. Ruettgers and his colleagues had many of
the answers we have been desperately seeking.
According to EMC2, which is supporting some path-breaking work on
information generation in the global economy at the University of
California at Berkeley, more information will be created in the next two
years than was generated in all previous years since the dawn of human
civilization.
Think about that for a minute. The total amount of information generated
on the planet during the next two years will exceed all information
created since the advent of cave painting around 40,000 B.C. Researchers
estimate that roughly 12 billion gigabytes (that is, 12 billion billion
bytes) of information have been created over the past 40,000 years. Over
the next two years, researchers estimate we will create 54 billion
gigabytes (or alternatively, 5.4 exabytes where one exabyte is equal to
1018 bytes) of information.
If that's not a projection for an information big bang, we don't know
what is.
In 1999 the worldwide production of information content would require
over 1.5 exabytes of storage. That's the equivalent of 250MB per person
for every man, woman, and child on earth. Ninety-three percent of the
information produced each year is stored in digital form. Hard drives in
stand-alone PCs account for 55% of total storage shipped each year.
Anyway you slice them, these are staggering statistics. They imply that
we are indeed witnessing the creation of an information big bang that is
likely to set civilization on a radical new path of evolution. To
understand the implications of this, we have to go back in history and
look at the impact of three other key inventions-language, writing, and
printing. Each of these inventions decreased the effort and cost
required to produce, store, and distribute information, thereby causing
an information explosion very similar to the one being created today.
As Douglas S. Robertson points out in his book, The New Renaissance:
Computers and the Next Level of Civilization, each of these inventions
is closely associated with the beginning of a fundamentally new form of
human society. The invention of language is associated with the very
beginning of the human race, the invention of writing with the beginning
of civilization, and the invention of printing with the beginning of
modern civilization.
Robertson notes that the most important dividing points in the history
of civilization were each accompanied by an invention that caused an
information explosion. He believes there is a strong cause-and-effect
relationship-that information explosions lead to major transformations
of civilization. As a result, Robertson believes the invention of
networked computing could well be the invention that will change
civilization to a degree not seen since the Renaissance, the time of the
last great revolution in information handling.
You might wonder why more analysts aren't discussing the importance of
the information big bang. Robertson points out that the quantitative
theory of information (a.k.a., Shannon's information theory) was one of
the great triumphs of the twentieth century, but that the theory is so
new (Shannon's seminal paper was published in 1948) that even in the
physical sciences many researchers are only beginning to understand its
full implications for their fields. As a result, we should not be
surprised that its implications for history and sociology have barely
begun to be probed.
Like Robertson, we believe the information big bang is a
civilization-altering event. Where it leads, nobody really knows. The
only things we can say with complete confidence is that we are headed
into uncharted territory and that storage technology is likely to become
even more mission critical to consumers, businesses and governments in
the years ahead.
Steve Waite, Andre Desautels and Max Jacobs" |
