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IS TOTAL HUMAN KNOWLEDGE INCREASING EXPONENTIALLY?

I found very poignant this reply to my Convergent Exponential Curves post: 

“Information includes words, phrases and new ways of describing things. To truly state that information is exponentially increasing would be to say that we are finding new facts about the universe at an exponential rate. … Is information knowledge?” 

It would not surprise me to learn that we are in fact discovering new facts about the universe at an exponential rate.  It is fundamentally in our interests to do so and seems to be happening automatically.  If we are getting smarter and generating more and better tools then it follows that we can unlock the secrets of life and the cosmos at an accelerating rate.  This seems to be happening bottom-up, in a broadly distributed manner as scientists, scholars, business folks, inventors etc. all strive to do more with less.  As they reduce the amount of Matter Energy Space and Time required for a process (see Buckminster Fuller and John Smart), and essentially MEST Compress, this allows them to behave in a more complex manner, perform more operations per MEST unit, combine technologies and forms in new ways, etc.  MEST Compression lets us create new tools for quantifying the universe, allows us to continue MEST Compression, and allows us to extrapolate physical laws and information by enabling complex new behavior.  It seems that the compulsive human instinct to MEST Compress is a primary driver of broader accelerating change.  (Check out John Smart’s Laws of Complex Systems for more on this http://www.accelerationwatch.com/laws.html.)  

Is information knowledge?  I think not completely.  I believe that knowledge requires context and a consciousness component.  Information is knowledge if it is useful to a human, organism or agent that can then apply it.  Interestingly, if Comm, Tech, and IQ are also on exponential curves, then it follows that our collective human Knowledge too is evolving at an exponential rate. 

As we MEANINGFULLY QUANTIFY our system at an accelerating rate, it would make sense that Knowledge is also accelerating.

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To better understand our collective human future it is important to identify and quantify the systems that are changing the fastest and fueling the greatest amount of change.

Four quantifiable human-related systems that are changing very rapidly are Communication (C), Human Intelligence (H), Information (I), and Technology (T).  It appears that these are all increasing at exponential (or at double-exponential rates). 

While it is widely accepted that technology is growing at an exponential rate, it is not so commonly believed that Communication, Human Intelligence, and Information are also changing at an exponential rate.  But, for good or for ill (or somewhere in-between), contrary to popular awareness, it appears these domains are in fact changing at exponential, or faster, rates. 

First off, technology:

Technology (Widely accepted): It is widely accepted that technology is increasing at an exponential rate.  Scientist, inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil compellingly argues that new scientific paradigms are being uncovered at a double-exponential rate (actually faster than straight-up exponential growth).  Many business CEOs, scientists and scholars subscribe to this belief. 

And now the other three:

Communication (Obscure, yet readily observable): The exponential rate of communication increase, particularly human-centric communication increase (and probably the general planetary rate of communication), can be glimpsed via the cascading S-curves indicating the adoption rate of Interactive Communication Technologies (ICTs).  ICTs, defined as technologies that allow for dynamic human communication, include books, the telegraph, radio, television, and the world wide web.  (Other ICTs may include cave paintings, chants, whistling, songs, money, and language itself.)   Over time each of these ICTs is adopted by the vast majority of the worldwide human population.  And each time a new ICT is born it diffuses faster than any previous ICT.  In Diffusion of Innovations (most recent edition), Everett Rogers graphically plots information collected by Vijay Gurbaxani and creates a nice image of overlapping, or cascading, ICT diffusion curves.  At a glance, this image indicates that we are generating and adopting faster modes of communication at an accelerating rate.  To me, this chart screams “exponential increase in communication.” 

Human Intelligence (Most contentious): The Flynn Effect shows that since 1900 the average human IQ has been rising steadily.  Flynn himself has supposed that this may be at an exponential rate.  The data corroborates.  Go check it out.  It will blow your mind… and make you smarter! ;)

Information (Slam dunk, quantitatively proven): Berkeley scholars Peter Lyman and Hal R. Varian have conclusively shown that the total amount of information on the planet is increasing at an exponential rate. See: http://www2.sims.berkeley.edu/research/projects/how-much-info-2003/printable_report.pdf

While it may be premature to conclusively state that C,H,I & T are each evolving at an exponential rate, the existing data certainly seems to support the hypothesis.  Personally, it makes a great deal of sense, considering the overlap of each of those areas.  If one or two are evolving at lightning speed, then it logically follows that the others should be as well. 

The ultimate conjecture here is that these domains are evolving autocatalytically, convergently, endogenously, or recursively (whichever term you may prefer) at exponential (or faster) rates.

Fortunately, each of these domains is quantifiable and allow for quantitative analysis.

The implications of a convergent exponential increase of Communication, Human Intelligence, Information and Technology are rather serious, indeed.  If true, this new framework for understanding human-related dynamics can change the way we view the world in which we live.

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What is a human generation? Here’s a good definition I found via wikipedia:

William Strauss and Neil Howe, in their book Generations, list the generations of Anglo-America. Their definition of "generation" is given as: A cohort-group, which are all persons born in a limited span of consecutive years, whose length approximates the span of a phase of life given to be approximately 22 years, and whose boundaries are fixed by peer personality. Peer personality generational persona recognized and determined by common age, location, common beliefs and behavior, and perceived membership in a common generation.

What is a technological generation? Here’s the wikipedia definition:

A generation can also be a stage or degree in a succession of natural descent as a grandfather, a father, and the father's son comprise three generations or stages of successive improvement in the development of a technology, such as computers, automobiles, or microprocessors

What is Human Generational Blur? Here’s my stab at a theory:

Fact: As new technologies are developed and diffused at an exponentially faster rate (see Kurzweil’s Law of Accelerating Returns), the rate of human reproduction (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population), while fast, is still nowhere near exponential.  Now, for the first time in planetary history the doubling rate of technology has become shorter than the length of one human generation, which has remained stable for a while at around 22 years long.  Generally speaking, Generation X, those born from the 1960’s to the 1980’s, marks the beginning of this transition period.

Theory: Many of the forces, structures, and environments that conspire to shape a distinct human generation, as defined by Strauss and Howe, are undergoing such rapid change that the traditional pattern of generational clusters spanning 22 years has been broken.  The result, which we are now starting to witness and understand, is the break-down of the existence of traditional generations into micro-generations, or “fractured” traditional generations, and the subsequent blurring of these little generational pockets as they interact with diverse information on the web (Web 2.0, Google Earth), interact with diverse other cultures via the web (chat rooms, Second Life), and communicate more effectively with over distances via Virtual Environmets (Second Life, The Sims, Everquest).  The generational blur effect occurs because large traditional generations can no longer sustain themselves and are digested by the technological environment.

Importance of Critical Periods: Because critical periods for the development of human personality remain fixed at short intervals that sometimes span less than one year, young humans born just a few years or months apart can grow up very different from one another because they experience a radically different environment during these critical learning periods.  That’s why kids who grow up with TVs, VCRs, computers, and Nintendo exhibit different behavior than their parents who were raised “walking 5 miles through snow to get to school”, which my dad actually did in Latvia.

Communication and Network Effects: Because the rate of human communication and connectivity is increasing at an exponential rate directly related to the exponential technology curve, the information environment that humans exist in (which is essential to the formation of generations) is much more fluid, accessible and dynamic.  This is not only forming distinct micro-generations, but also broadly blurring generations by morphing common beliefs and common behavior while allowing individuals of different ages and demographics to socialize and form unprecedented bonds.

Note: I believe Generational Blur to be inevitable, considering the skyrocketing rate of technology growth.  When looked at as part of broader evolutionary process, I am inclined to think that we’re undergoing a shift to both more specialized generations and also more massive generational pockets.  It feels like a period of rapid inevitable reorganization of human neural resources. … Generational Blur is an adaptation of my earlier theory of Generational Compression, which was very confusing.  I think this new version will make more sense to more people.

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Thesis: As virtual worlds proliferate and evolve, 4-D Idea Markets will emerge as powerful new social structures because of the ginormous value that can be saved and generated by coordinating human processing activity (a.k.a. brains & thought) according to a timeline.

What is an Idea Market? Idea markets have been around for some time now.  Technically, the very first idea market was launched whenever organisms first developed the ability to act on stored behavior scripts and competed for life (probably anaerobic bacteria, unless behavioral scripts can be stored at some other physical level).  But nowadays the common definition of an Idea Market is far more human-centric, and goes something like this: a system in which many humans individually ascribe value to certain ideas in order to better estimate the value of those ideas, generally for some socio-economic purpose.  

Examples of Idea Markets: Voting is one of the oldest and simplest forms of an Idea Market, a process that allows a large group of people to collectively make a binary decision.  Ben Franklin was known to brainstorm with a council of advisors, called a Hunta (sp.?), and attributed much creativity to this process.  The government, especially the Pentagon and other intelligence agencies, has been known to rely on internal Idea Markets to help identify terrorist targets, identify other threats, and to compute what to do with resources.  The Stock Market is an Idea Market that allows human to very accuratley estimate the value of corporations.  The Wikipedia, a highly accurate encyclopedia compiled by the poeple of the world, is an open access Idea Market.  The Hollywood Stock Exchange lets hundreds of thousands of users buy and sell "movie stocks" to have fun, then uses their predictions to compute highly accurate box office predictions.  The Google search engine is in part a highly complex behavior and Idea Market that allows people to find the information that others have searched for.  * For more information, a great Harvard business School article by Ajit Kambil and about the demonstrated power of Idea Markets, with some good examples of internal corporate idea markets, can be found at http://hbswk.hbs.edu/pubitem.jhtml?id=3808&t=innovation.
 
So, what's a 4-D Idea Market?  A 4-D idea market is any idea market in which the data being scored/valued is plotted on a timeline.  In other words, it is an idea market with a formal timeline component that allows extrapolation into the future (prediction) or the past (revision).  The Hollywood Stock Exchange is an example of a Predictive Idea Market, but it can only forecast near-term events.  Stock market Puts and Calls allow people to place bets on the future performance of a given stock.  Even a family discussing budgeting over a given period of time can be considered a 4-D idea market because they compare individual extrapolations to arrive at a consensus best guess on the best course of behavior.  So long as it involves brains and predictive activity, it's probably a 4-D Idea Market.

The Impact of VW's on 4-D Idea Markets: Since biology started churning out 4-D Idea Markets, they’ve been limited by the laws of physics and the types of physical structures that make up our environment.  However, the system we live in constantly reorganizes itself via autocatalytic evolution and development and spits out new structures (organisms, technology or combinations thereof) that allow for increased speed of communication of ideas/information.  (This happens at various systems levels and contributes to John Smart's computational MEST compression.)  In human history, the primary drivers/substrates of/for increased communication are Interactive Communication Technologies (ICTs).  ICT's have included gesturing, words/memes, language, the volume amplification cone, drawing, writing, books/moveable type, the telegraph, the telephone, movies, broadcast TV, the internet, and dynamic websites.  Presently, we are witnessing the birth of the latest ICT: Virtual Worlds.  

Typically, Virtual Worlds are massive virtual environments that look just like video games, but that allow users far more control over the enviornment and with the ability to communicate.  Some popular virtual worlds include Second Life (the break-out leader right now), Multiverse (created by the founders of Netscape, up and coming fast), and The Sims 2 (still more a game, but getting really close).  Fundamentally, virtual worlds allow for a market of creation, behavior and communication to develop in a 3-D interactive setting.  Already, the efficiency benefits of virtual worlds are becoming very evident as humans all over the globe are pumping a great deal of capital into them, while also using them as a platform to earn up to $150,000 per year. 

An interesting recent development is that Virtual worlds are being used as 3-D wikis, a type of collaborative software, and it's become obvious that Google Earth has the potential to become the biggest 3-D wiki of them all.  A good friend and former Hollywood roommate, Jerry Paffendorf, discusses the benefits of a merger between wikipedia and Google Earth and advances the concept of the 3-D wiki in this blog post.  (Paffendorf also helps run Democracy Island, an innovative educational venture launched in Second Life that is begining to explore the potential of 3-D wikis.)    

Being that Virtual Worlds are now exploding onto the worldwide scene (Second Life growth forecast, book by Castronova on business and VWs), I think it's high-time to start thinking about the dynamic 4-D Idea Markets that can be created inside Virtual Worlds because 1) dropping computing costs, and 2) increasing wi-fi connectivity are about to allow for some robust and crazy sh*t.  

What's the benefit of 4-D vs. 3-D?  4-D idea markets help predict the future and revise the past.  They can be used to forecast events and clarify what already occured.  They already exist.  Hollywood Stock Exchange is a good example of a 4-D idea market.  But they are nowhere near their potential.  Just imagine the value that could be generated if hundreds of thousands, or millions of users decided to collaboratively predict something other than box office revenues.  For instance, what if the government, a corporation or non-profit foundation set up an online futures market for natural disasters, disease epidemics, innovations, or some other high-value human domain.  Wouldn't that information be very useful in building a better world?

Possible New 4-D Idea Market Structures: Over the next few years we can expect to witness the explosive development of 4-D Idea Markets because of the broad system efficiencies they represent (lower redundancy of thought processes / human computing, increased foresight, increased awareness of the nature of the system).  As we increase the communication quality of the web via increased processing, better software and more human participants, it is inevitable that these structures (just like families, bands, tribes, cities, corporations, armies, etc.) will emerge and play a significant role in human decision making at all levels. 

Some 4-D Idea Markets likely to pop-up in the near term Include:

Open-Source Tunnel of Time: Imagine a website similar to the Hollywood Stock Exchange where people go to cast predictions and see how accurate they are.   (A number of sites already attempt to do this, most notably The Long Bets Foundation, but none are anywhere close to establishing the value and consistent contribution/revision behavior of Wikipedia.)  What's different about this portal is that everyone must choose from a bank of predictions (like movie stocks on HSX, or stocks in the RL market) and then place them on a timeline.  This way, the values can be cross-referenced easily across the board.  This will allow for a variety of valuable data: individual prediction scores, individual prediction scores by domain, individual prediction scores by time-frame, individual prediction scores by domain and by time-frame, group prediction scores by category/time-frame/demographic, etc.  Best of all, both the individual and aggregate time lines can be plotted first in 3-D (the files can be placed in any desired array in a 3-D virtual setting, in a cluster) and then in the 4-D (the 3-D file clusters can then be arranged sequentially, so that one can view them in order by flying through or scrolling).  Basically this allows the creation of an ultimate reference tool, a literal tunnel of ideas fixed to a timeline.  One could literally walk forward or backward in time and view eith what occured or what most people think is going to occur, or what some specific people think is going to occur.  I believe that such public 4-D Idea Markets will represent the best structure for harness the largest number of brains the most efficiently.  (I believe that the Earth is already one of these markets, but that's going a bit too deep too early -- a discussion to be enjoyed in the future.)  This may seem vague, but just try to visualize the tunnel and I'm sure you'll see bazillions of uses for this new technology.

Production & Development Structures: It's not much of a stretch to venture that media outlets like MTV, G4 and Current.tv will look to efficiently harness the growing amount of content in the world as well as the growing amount of content sorters.  So what will their business structures look like?  They'll be 4-D Idea markets, me thinks.  Why? 1. Virtual worlds will soon allow all media (text, docs, images, audio, video, websites, flash, 3-D images, etc.) to be mixed together in new ways.  This will result in efficent new sorting and creating mechanisms.  2. A virtual structure will allow these companies to cast the broadest possible net.  3. By plotting anticipated developments on a timeline, these companies will have a more-accuarate-than-ever programming tool forecasting what content will be available and how popular it will be.  4. A virtual market will allow for better programs to rise to the top, enabling better moreinformed selection of what goes on air.  5. These markets will be able to compete with similar bottom-up structures better than the current business models employed by these companies.  6. Once st up, these structures will automatically generate users, content and content sorters.  This will represent a new commerce/info/content relationship.

Closed / Internal Forecasting Models: This is the same idea as the Tunnel of Time, just a smaller closed system.  corporations, families, sports teams, clubs, political parties, non-profits, any groups at all will be able to harness 4-D Idea markets, much as they utilize internal blogs and wikis nowadays, as they seek to better negotiate their environment.

Implications for Society: I believe that 4-D Idea Markets will allow for massive increases in group intelligence, forecasting.  They will help change the decision making process for businesses, governments, families, all groups.  4-D Idea Markets will help avert new disasters.   4-D Idea Markets will help fuel new crime.   4-D Idea Markets will helpt ot better quantify the current system.   4-D Idea Markets will help reduce the energy wasted on millions of people making the same predictions in the same domain areas and will allow the species to push our collective vision father into the future and past.   4-D Idea Markets will help us better understand human nature and psychology.   4-D Idea Markets will help us better identify human value/resources.  Essentially, I believe that  4-D Idea Markets are an amplification of existing computational processes and will prove very important to humanity as we approach a convergence in information/technology.

A Call for Dialogue: If 4-D Idea markets are interesting to you, then please drop me a line to either shoot the sh*t or just to let me know what you're up to.  I'd like to see things come into existence for the sake of humanity, and because the concept fascinates me.  I want to walk thorugh a tunnel of time (not just in my own brain) at some point in my life, and hopefully that will come sooner than later.  It's only a matter of time and MEST compression until these things pervade our system.  I hope that I am not wrong in believing that they will benefit the evolution and development of the system and our species.