Info Essay V1: When the Numbers Crunch Us

We live in an age of information. In 10 point font you can fit roughly 133,251 pages of text into a single gigabyte of memory. That's about 445 three hundred page books (another source estimated 430 books per gig of memory)...in one gig. Most laptops come with at least a five hundred gigabyte hard-drive already installed. Desktops often come with a terabyte or two terabytes of hard-drive space (that's about 1024 gigs in one terabyte). Petabyte hard-drives (1024 terabytes) are expected to become common for consumer use in less than a decade. The math is quite simply astounding. Suffice it to say that a million books could easily fit in the palm of your hand in a 2 terabyte hard-drive. The question then becomes clear, what in the world are humans doing with this vast amount of information available at their fingertips? The answer is, we play games on Facebook.

            It's sad but understandable. After all, isn't there such a thing as information overload? We've just got too much information and while they call it the information age and that seems to have so many positive connotations, hardly anyone is taking advantage of all the the learning available at our fingertips. We put more and more space in our computers in order to satiate our need for instantly available media like videos and music, but what value does a hard-drive filled with TV shows and movies really have? Multimedia for the purpose of entertainment has its merits. Movies and music are valuable artistically, but if all we had was text, wouldn't we be learning much more? Sure, it's nice to be able to play a time consuming game while we wait for a doctor's appointment or a ride, but what's the actual value of it? We use the phrase "time consuming' all the time in reference to traffic jams or a project at work, but we don't even seem to notice when we spend three hours looking at our friend's Facebook updates or silly Youtube videos.

            Some would argue that social networking sites and video games are the new TV, and I whole-heartily agree with that statement. The question is, why did we need TV?  Why do we need our social media and video games, and what's next? We seem to have a habit of replacing one technology with another in order to keep ourselves entertained, to keep from thinking too much, but why shouldn't we think? Isn't that exactly the quality that makes us human? Our ability to reason and form logical thought, to attempt to divine our place in the universe, is at the core of why we have the capacity to build civilizations and to attempt to be moral and just. Our ability to the think is the reason why we're not quite dead yet. I can't even begin to imagine how many times I've told friends or family that "I just need to check out," or "I need a little downtime," or my personal favorite, "I'm just feeling a bit drained." So what does all that mean? I would argue that it has to do with being overwhelmed mentally and emotionally, that is to say that our minds are taking in so much information that we simply can't process it all on a conscious level. So entertainment allows our conscious minds to shut down and the informational backlog in our heads gets filtered through our subconscious mind.

            So what does the future hold? Technological advances are moving forward at a rate higher than any other time in known human history. Gerald S. Hawkins talks about “mindsteps” or paradigm shifts which are accelerating in frequency. Technology keeps growing and information becomes more and more readily available. Many futurists seem to believe that technology will continue accelerating at an exponential rate possibly leading to a Technological Singularity, or “the emergence of greater-than-human intelligence through technological means” (Wiki) which would end life as we know it on this planet simply because human minds aren’t capable of comprehending super-intelligence of this sort. Current literature and movies seem to predict that technology will become so powerful or will go wrong in some way that eliminates life as we know it through an apocalyptic happening of some sort. As of this moment we have 988 years to find out as everyone assumes these world changing events will occur in this millennium, the more likely outcome in my mind is that the current trend of avoiding thought and entertaining ourselves to the point of decay will slowly shut off the door to technological advances. If Americans don’t make a change in the fundamentally flawed approach that we have towards life then grow will eventually become impossible.