“Back in my day!” How many of us have heard that admonition? It’s so commonplace that it’s gone beyond a cliche, and recently seems to be fading from the general zeitgeist. I think there are interesting reasons for that. Perhaps there was even a time before such a sentiment could exist. Buckminster Fuller (building on the work of Claude Shannon, and others) wrote about the rate of doubling of information in his book, “Critical Path.” Taking all information available to human-kind at the year 1 AD as one unit, Buckminster calculated that the amount of information available to be known by humans took 1500 years to double. Information doubled again by 1750 AD. Then again by 1900 AD. As we can see, the rate at which information is doubling appears to be accelerating. That falls in line with the general … Continue reading
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