Quotes About Information

But we don't have much experience in regulating the ownership of data,

evolutionary pressures have adapted the human brain to store immense quantities of botanical, zoological, topographical and social information.

But the most important information that needed to be conveyed was about humans, not about lions and bison. Our language evolved as a way of gossiping.

Some fake news lasts forever.

The more data we have and the better we understand history, the faster history alters its course, and the faster our knowledge becomes outdated.

In the twenty-first century censorship works by flooding people with irrelevant information.

truth" is defined by the top results of the Google search.

The liberal political system was shaped during the industrial era to manage a world of steam engines, oil refineries, and television sets. It has difficulty dealing with the ongoing revolutions in information technology and biotechnology.

In the past, censorship worked by blocking the flow of information. In the twenty first century, censorship works by blocking the flow of information.

We are now creating tame humans that produce enormous amounts of data and function as very efficient chips in a huge data-processing mechanism, but these data-cows hardly maximize the human potential.

In such a world, the last thing a teacher needs to give her pupils is more information. They already have far too much of it. Instead, people need the ability to make sense of information, to tell the difference between what is important and what is unimportant, and above all to combine many bits of information into a broad picture of the world.

In the twenty-first century censorship works by flooding people with irrelevant information. We just don't know what to pay attention to, and often spend our time investigating and debating side issues. In ancient times having power meant having access to data. Today having power means knowing what to ignore.

Reliable information about who could be trusted meant that small bands could expand into larger bands, and Sapiens could develop tighter and more sophisticated types of cooperation.

In fact, AI might make centralized systems far more efficient than diffused systems, because machine learning works better the more information it can analyze. If you disregard all privacy concerns and concentrate all the information relating to a billion people in one database, you can train much better algorithms than if you respect individual privacy and have in your database only partial information on a million people.

In the twenty-first century, however, data will eclipse both land and machinery as the most important asset, and politics will be a struggle to control the flow of data. If data becomes concentrated in too few hands, humankind will split into different species.

So far, many of these giants seem to have adopted the business model of "attention merchants."2 They capture our attention by providing us with free information, services, and entertainment, and they then resell our attention to advertisers.

Consider Google. Google wants to reach a point where we can ask it anything and get the best answer in the world. What

Just think of the way that within a mere two decades, billions of people have come to entrust the Google search algorithm with one of the most important tasks of all: searching for relevant and trustworthy information. We no longer search for information. Instead, we google.

In the late twentieth century democracies usually outperformed dictatorships because democracies were better at data processing.

The main handicap of authoritarian regimes in the twentieth century - the attempt to concentrate all information in one place - might become their decisive advantage in the twenty-first cenutry.

as we increasingly rely on Google for answers, so our ability to search for information by ourselves diminishes. Already today, 'truth' is defined by the top results of the Google search.

Between the years 3500 BC and 3000 BC, some unknown Sumerian geniuses invented a system for storing and processing information outside their brains, one that was custom-built to handle large amounts of mathematical data. The Sumerians thereby released their social order from the limitations of the human brain, opening the way for the appearance of cities, kingdoms and empires. The data-processing system invented by the Sumerians is called 'writing'.

Big data is watching you

It is the responsibility of all of us to invest time and effort in uncovering our biases and in verifying our sources of information. As noted in earlier chapters, we cannot investigate everything ourselves. But precisely because of that, we need to at least carefully investigate our favorite sources of information—be they a newspaper, a website, a TV network, or a person.