opinions-essays-theInformationAge

Are we entering an "Information Age"? Perhaps.

What might be the characteristics of the Information Age? I'll give my views.

Please note that I am not at all certain about these; I certainly wouldn't bet on them; and I wouldn't be surprised if I were totally wrong. Although for readability I'll speak using simply the future tense, pretend that every sentence reads not "this will happen", but rather "i sort of think that maybe this might happen".

Note also that in reading this over, I detect a fair bit of optimism and predicting what I think should happen (rather than what will happen). Be warned.

Intellectual property

A lot has been made of "well, since most of the new value being produced will be information, we'd better get on the problem of making information function, in an economic sense at least, like physical property, so that the development of information can be funded". A well-intentioned idea, and one that I used to agree with. But now I think it totally misses the mark. The implicit assumption in that statement is that the current economic system is the right way to fund things in the Information Age. I think it isn't, mostly because the reason that treating information like physical property has too high of an economic cost.

What's the cost?

So what'll happen instead

I dunno. Something different.

Open source/free software seems like the best guess right now.

How will this be funded? I dunno. Maybe the same way scientific research is; as a "public good", paid for mostly by taxes, and partially by clever ideas for related revenue (e.g. charging students who want to learn from the researchers). I think that academia should have "professors of open source", whose job is not to create new knowledge, but to create widely-used free software implementations based on known algorithms. Other ideas are to create intellectual property with a "gift economy" or a "reputation economy".

The Rent

One thing that will NOT change in the "information age" is the fact that I mostly need to buy things other than information. The plurality of my spending is rent. Nothing "informationy" will decrease the nature of my need for space to live in, decrease my desire not to share that space with a bunch of people, or increase the available space in which to live. Therefore I'll still need to pay the rent, and the rent will still be too high. (of course maybe I'll be able to pay the rent with my ideas, or get the space as a gift, or "pay" it with trust)

Same goes with food (although presumably as the information age makes distribution systems get better, food will be cheaper -- but someone will still have to grow it).

Manufactoring

Right now manufactoring is still too scarce/valuable for it to really be considered an "information age". The MIT Fab Lab project, and similar projects in the future, might change that by allowing anyone in the first world the ability to cheaply produce almost anything for which they have the plans and the raw materials (although you'll still be able to get a cheaper or better version from a factory; but this will dramatically drive down prices, as well as allowing you to make whatever things that you want but which no company is bothering to sell).

The Internet

People seem to think that the internet and the WWW became popular in the 90s, and at that time there were lots of predications of how that would change everything, but then that was shown to be unrealistic when the stock market crashed. Now people seem to expect the internet to be pretty much "finished".

Actually, we have only barely begun to create the internet and that the internet will change radically and frequently in the next few decades (the Semantic Web is one change that is near).

Even if we stopped innovating technologically, the main social, economic, and political implications of the internet haven't yet manifested.

Groups

The internet will allow people to collect themselves into groups more effectively, and those groups will be able to make better decisions (they will become "smarter").

Civil society

Politically and economically, civil society will become a lot more important and powerful for the reasons given in "groups", above.

Democracy

In countries with a long history of democracy, democracy will begin to start to actually work as intended as we acquire an electronic infrastructure for ordinary citizens to actually communicate their views to decision-makers (and as civil society pressure groups become cohesive enough to control voting blocs of their members, and therefore powerful enough in democratic politics to force the politicians to listen).

It will be slow (as it should be; you should be conservative when radically changing government) but democracy will become a lot more "direct".

I don't know if non-democratic countries will become more democratic. Maybe eventually.

Freedom of speech

I don't know if governments will consider it legal, but "information wants to be free" and it'll become impossible for governments to keep their people in the dark by censoring news. (governments will still have secrets that "no one" knows, though, there just won't be items that are well-known in some places but secret in others).

The media

Will become smaller, more participatory, and more decentralized. Thing weblogs rather than a few large corporations. The large corporations will still exist and will still dominate some forms of media (the kinds that are expensive to produce or which require you to be "important" to be allowed to distribute), but most people will get most of their news from the newer, more decentralized systems.

Teleconferencing

If you live far away from your family and friends, you won't have to fly around so much just to hang out. Consumers will eventually get high-quality teleconferencing. You'll be able sith down and watch a movie with your friends, seeing each other's faces and talking and laughing together, without physically being in the same place. This'll be dirt cheap.

Mesh networking

Except for when you cross oceans or large unpopulated areas, information traffic will be carried not only by communications companies, but also by mesh networked nodes owned or setup by whoever lives there.

What comes after the Information Age?

There's a bunch of things that would change the world so much that it might not be called the Information Age anymore.

If we moved into space, people might think that was cool enough to start calling it "the space age" (again) rather than "the information age".

If nanotech made it easy to produce physical tools and materials from widely available raw materials, we might call it "the nanotech age".

If we could upload our minds into computers I don't know what we'd call it but that would be pretty big.

If we could make our biological bodies immortal we might call it "the dawn of immortality".

If there was another world war and our technological infrastructure was destroyed we might call it "the post-war era" or "the long winter" or my favorite, just "the stone age".

If there was another world war and some particular religion or ideology came to global dominance, we might call it "the XXX age", where XXX is that ideology.

If pandemics cause too much trouble we might call it "the XXX age", where XXX is the most notable pandemic.

If we extinguished war, we might call it "the dawn of peace", and if we extinguished poverty, "the dawn of prosperity".

If we start making robots that can actually do almost all of work for us, we might call it "the robots age".

If corporations achieve more political power we might call it "the age of corporations".

If governments are abolished, we might call it "the dawn of anarchy". if civil society comes to prominence without abolishing governments, we might call it "the age of civil society".

If there was a prolonged worldwide economic depression, we might call it "the Second Depression".

If any competing economic system mostly replaces capitalism, we might call it "the end of capitalism".

If some totalitarian or surveillance-based government or entity acheives power, we would call it whatever that entity wanted us to but if it is ever overthrown they'd call it "the age of XXX", where XXX is that entity.

if human-level A.I. is acheived we may call it "the age of A.I.".