In the last post, I discussed the explosion of intelligence in its human, embedded, and artificial forms. We are seeing a similar explosion in information. Each day brings another 2.5 quintillion bytes into existence. A quintillion is a billion billion, a 10 followed by 18 zeroes. Information traffic is up as well. 400 quintillion bytes are created, captured, copied, and consumed every day as well. The numbers of both are growing exponentially. It is estimated that roughly 90% of all data in the world has been generated in the last two years. 

The simplest definition of information is data that has been captured and processed to provide meaning about something in our world. Information gives us insight about some aspect of the world around us. Information comes in a variety of forms, including text, video, sound, images, taste, and smell. 

As information increases in both scope and volume, the 21st century demands we have better information curation skills. Without curation we would be verwhelmed with useless information. Curation requires a sharp focus and a proper understanding of the qualities of information. Most people have neither. Both are critical. 

All information is not visible to us. There is a vast amount not available to us in the world today. We call this hidden information. Police do not share everything they know with the public when investigating crimes. Certain facts and evidence are kept secret in the interests of verifying confessions and protecting the integrity of the investigation. Games like poker are based on hidden information unlike chess, where all information is clearly visible. Algorithms are hidden in “black boxes” that prevent inspection. Financial investments are often conducted through shell companies, disguising real ownership. There are laws, rules, and regulations protecting trade secrets. Governments hide the existence of covert operations in massive budgets. We know information is hidden because its existence can be inferred. We learn to live knowing of its existence. 

Information can be judged by its importance to us. We sift through the noise to find the signal. The noise represents the random, unwanted and unfiltered information we do not want. The signal is valuable information. It todays world, we have too much noise and not enough signal. 

The most important information we can receive helps us understand causality. Humans desire certainty and understanding above all else. We hate uncertainty and ambiguity. We demand answers. Properly sequenced information provides us with insights into causality. X caused Y. Today it is harder to determine causal connections. They are covered up by noise. 

All information has a source. Today it is getting harder to determine the source. The fingerprints have been wiped clean and the serial number has been filed off. We pass information off not maintaining a chain of custody. We simply pass it on. It becomes hard to track information back to its original source for verification and true meaning. Information passed on often gets distorted leaving us with something that is not close in meaning with the original. It is hard to trace information back to original sources because of the increase in propagation. It takes patience to find the source.

Information is either valid or not. Valid information is put forward in good faith to support arguments and provide credibility. Ultimately the information may turn out to be false, but at the time it is created, it is believed to be true. The world today is full of information that is not valid. We call this disinformation and misinformation. Disinformation is false or misleading information that is intended to deceive, manipulate or harm. It is done maliciously. Misinformation is false information that is spread with no intent to harm. It is simply incorrect. Today both types are increasing in number. AI can be used to generate videos (called AI slop) of fantastical beasts and strange events, for entertainment and deception. Large Language Models (LLMs) that power the leading AI systems are trained with public data primarily sourced from the Internet. It means tools like Grok and ChatGPT are trained on misinformation and disinformation. It seeps through in their answers. Media companies face a difficult choice. They can invest billions to filter out erroneous and malicious content or let everything go. As volume increases, companies such as X, Meta, ByteDance, Alphabet, Snap, Pinterest, and Reddit opt for less expensive guardrails. 

Information has a shelf life of usefulness. Some information is timeless. Axioms handed down from generation to generation remain as relevant and valuable as ever. Other information is outdated and useless. Coding languages learned in the 1980s have been discontinued, morphed into other languages, or are largely irrelevant (the exception being COBOL). The shelf life of information is defined as the time it takes for half of the information of a domain of knowledge to be superseded or proven untrue. Physics papers have a shelf life of about 13 years, psychology papers about 7. As science advances information becomes irrelevant, yet it remains published on the Internet 

The cost of information acquisition is rising. As the amount information distributed over the Internet is increasing, so too are access fees. Along with service fees for the Internet itself, companies hide information behind pay walls. More valuable information costs more. Governments spend billions to steal information from businesses and other governments. Costs are incurred to guard information which is passed on. In the age of the Internet where information was supposed to be free, $10.5 trillion is spent on cybersecurity annually. 

Information is specific to a knowledge domain. It is scientific, technical, economic, political, military, religious, financial, social, cultural, sporting, personal, artistic, mathematical, and much more. Within each of these categories, information can defined as having been verified (objective) or being based on interpretation (subjective). What is subjective one day can be objective the next and vice versa. Information does not come with a warning label. It is hard to fully understand what is objective and what is not. 

The amount of information needed to describe something is called information entropy. For events with little uncertainty, information entropy is low. The results of a coin flip can be captured by 1 bit. For events with high uncertainty and many states, information entropy is high. Most of human experience is described by the Internet in 175 trillion gigabytes. Much of it represents uncertainty and disorder. AS information entropy increases, it makes the task of curating information harder. 

Information is increasing in importance. Physicists now believe that information is a fundamental building block of the universe along with matter and energy. The late physicist John Archibald Wheeler called this belief “it from bit”. Physical matter (“it”) emerges from information (“bit”). This has led to the theory that the universe is effectively a giant computer processing rules and information.
The theory of information being a fundamental building block of the universe was formalized n 2023. Researchers Robert Hazen and Michael Wong proposed a new law of nature called he “Law of Increasing Functional Information”. It states:

The functional information of a system will increase (i.e.,the system will evolve) if many different configurations of the system are subjected to selection for one or more functions.

Put another way, systems seek to evolve settling on configurations of components that are both functional and stable. Over time, the amount of functional information describing these components increases as well. Nature likes to keep a record of what works. As these stable components increase, so too does the amount of functional information describing these configurations. Natural systems keep a record of what works. The amount of functional information is a measure of its algorithmic complexity.

Information is key to knowledge and wisdom. Processed information can become knowledge. Knowledge is used to understand patterns and relationships occurring in the real world. Knowledge provides insight and understanding into how the real world works in the form of cause and effect. Knowledge that is applied becomes wisdom. Wisdom is deployed when we make decisions and act in the world. When we do not use wisdom, we are just acting. 

It is the greatest paradox of our time. We possess the most powerful tools in history to help us collect, curate, and distill information into knowledge and wisdom. We are rich information. At the same time we are information illiterate. We use the very same tools that produce the vast amounts of useful information we have today to produce vast amounts of worthless information that make our lives harder. The problem is not going away. It will get worse in the future. How we choose to deal with it is anybody’s guess.