"information explosion" is a threat to the future of civilization. Information explosion

The accelerated development of production was naturally accompanied by a corresponding increase and renewal of the amount of knowledge accumulated by mankind. D. Martin, one of the leading experts in the field of information processing, states that “... by 1800 the total amount of human knowledge doubled every 50 years, by 1950 it doubled every 10 years, and by 1970 - every 5 years.” . Some analysts believe that this period is currently only 2-3 years. The avalanche-like growth of information flows, which began in the 19th century, by the middle of the 20th century led to the fact that people lost the ability to navigate the sea of ​​information and process it effectively, since even a simple search for the necessary information had to expend very significant efforts. And this despite the fact that a significant proportion of people have already been involved in the labor process directly related to information processing. According to a number of American researchers, by the middle of the 20th century, more than 30% of the working population (accountants, postal workers, bank workers, etc.) were involved in the information sphere of work in the United States. The situation that arose was once called an “information explosion.” By the end of the 20th century, information became the main subject of labor in social production in industrialized countries. And the tendency to transfer labor resources from the material sphere to the sphere one way or another related to information processing is steadily strengthening throughout the world.

The emergence of computers

So, by the middle of the 20th century, humanity faced the problem of curbing the “raging” information disaster, when information becomes inaccessible only because there is an extremely large amount of it and finding the necessary data is very, very difficult.

By this time (as if by order), the technical conditions for the production of software-controlled computers were created, which were implemented in the electromechanical computers mentioned above. However, mechanical movements - an integral part of the implementation of computational operations in mechanical and electromechanical machines - significantly limited their performance. For example, the fastest relay machine “RVM-1”, which was built in the 50s of the 20th century in the USSR under the leadership of N.I. Bessonov, performed a multiplication operation in 0.05 s (20 multiplications per second).

That is, the RVM-1 was only 14 times faster than the Mark-2. This level of performance did not satisfy the practical needs even of that time. Only completely electronic, that is, excluding mechanical movements during the calculation process and, therefore, inertia-free devices could solve the problem of the speed of computers.

The operating program of the ENIAC machine was set manually using mechanical switches and flexible cables with plugs inserted into the required connectors. Therefore, any changes in the program required a lot of effort and time. The outstanding mathematician John von Neumann, analyzing the work of the first computers, came to the conclusion that it was necessary to store the running program and the data processed by this program inside the machine, in its electronic circuits, and not outside it - on punched cards, punched tapes or connectors with plugs. The first stored program machine is the EDSAC (Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator) computer, built by M. Wilkes in Great Britain in 1949.

It is customary to count down the first generation of computers from this machine.

In our country, the first computers were created around the same period. In 1947-1951, under the leadership of Academician Lebedev, the first Soviet computer was launched - MESM (Small Electronic Calculating Machine). In addition, the machines “Strela”, “Minsk”, “Ural”, BESM (Big Electronic Calculating Machine), M-2, “Mir” and some others were produced, developed under the leadership of major Soviet designers and theorists I. S. Bruk , M. A. Kartsev, B. I. Rameev, V. M. Glushkov, Yu. A. Bazilevsky.

An information explosion is a process in which there is a constant increase in the speed and volume of information on a global scale.

It is also worth talking about information barriers. This concept was developed by academician V. M. Glushkov. It represents the discrepancy between the information demands of society and the technical capabilities of their implementation. According to Glushkov, there are three information barriers:

1) Associated with the discovery of writing, which makes it possible to preserve and transmit knowledge. Until this point, the human brain was the only place where information was stored. This barrier was overcome around the 5th millennium BC. e.

3) Associated with the advent of Electronic Computers (Computers), which made it possible to increase the speed of information processing by an order of magnitude. This barrier was passed in the mid-20th century, with the advent of the first computer. At that moment, the volumes of information turned out to be so large that the human brain and its abilities for this processing were simply not enough.

And accordingly, it is clear that the growth of information became especially significant after the scientific and technological revolution. If we now analyze the growth of information, we can see a simple exponential dependence of the growth in the amount of information on time, which is shown in the figure below.

Mikhail Naumovich Epstein in his book “The Information Explosion and Postmodern Trauma” writes that: “Two centuries ago, in 1798, Thomas R. Malthus released his famous “Essay on the Law of Population and Its Impact on the Future Improvement of Society,” where he defined the law of disproportion between population growth and the amount of natural resources needed for human life. It turns out that humanity is increasing exponentially, and natural resources are being renewed at a rate described by arithmetic progression. And Malthus predicted that with such a rate of human growth, there would simply be no resources left on Earth to feed humanity and famine would occur. But by the end of the 20th century, this problem was partially avoided due to the development of technology, and due to “... the success of education, which sharply reduced the birth rate in civilized countries.”

And two hundred years after Malthus, a new problem appears, but this time it is not demographic, but informational.

The information explosion manifests itself in the following:

• The emergence of contradictions between the limited human abilities to process information and the existing powerful flows and sizes of stored information.
• The existence of a huge amount of unnecessary (redundant) information, making it difficult to perceive useful information for the consumer.
• The emergence of all kinds of economic, political and other social barriers that impede the dissemination of information. For example, secret information needed for a specific production.

The information explosion has many consequences, I would like to talk about the problem of human intelligence after the information explosion.

§2. Human intelligence after the information explosion.

What is intelligence? The Great Soviet Encyclopedia says that “intelligence (from Latin intellectus - knowledge, understanding, reason), the ability of thinking, rational cognition, in contrast to such, for example, mental abilities as feeling, will, intuition, imagination, etc. "

In order for a person to feel normal, he needs to have three components in himself: physical, spiritual and intellectual. If you take away even one of the components, then a person will not be able to exist.

To train the intellect, the brain needs to work, i.e. read, think, etc., but do it gradually and completely, and not in leaps and bounds and a little bit everywhere.

This is the problem with the information explosion. There is a lag between man and humanity. There is an increasing imbalance between “the development of human individuality, limited by biological age, and the socio-technological development of humanity, for which there is no time limit in sight.” With each new generation, an increasingly heavy burden of knowledge and impressions accumulated in previous centuries and which a person is not able to assimilate is placed on a person’s personality.

This whole sum of knowledge and that vast amount of information, accumulating in the interval of, say, the 16th-17th centuries, is now delivered to our head within one week, that is, the speed of information creation increases thousands of times, despite the fact that the information accumulated by all previous at times, it is also continuously summarized and updated as part of new information resources.

It turns out that a person of the modern turn (20-21) centuries must understand a colossal number of times more information in his life than his compatriot who lived somewhere 300-400 years ago.

We can cite some statistics related to the information explosion, the main victims of which are the last two or three generations of the 20th century.

The world's best libraries double their number of books and treasures every 14 years. At the beginning of the 13th century, the Sorbonne library in Paris was considered the largest in Europe: it contained 1338 books.

The daily edition of the New York Times has more information than the average 17th century Englishman studied in his lifetime.

More new information has been produced in the last 30 years than in the previous five thousand years.

Consequently, a person may feel disadvantaged in development, crippled, unable to fully compare with the information environment around him.

Voltaire said: “The number of facts and writings is growing so quickly that in the near future it will be necessary to reduce everything to extracts and dictionaries.”

This is confirmed in the 21st century, fewer and fewer people read classic novels of the 17th-19th centuries, and some even know about their existence only from encyclopedias, and short retellings, movies, articles in magazines and the Internet. This is quite expected, because... A large amount of information has appeared that is impossible for a person to study in his lifetime. And Epstein M.N. in his book he says that if the average life expectancy of a person were increased to a thousand years, then culture would return to its normal course, and a person would have enough time and energy to read without haste all the great works of the classics, and more time would be devoted to the study of various aspects than in ordinary human life.

If earlier you had to travel around the world to get a certain book, now you can hardly even go to the library, because... All books fit in computer memory. For example, according to research conducted by Carnegie Mallon University, over the entire history of printing, people have created more than 100 million books. Almost 28 million of them can be found in the Library of Congress.
Typically, a book in DOC format weighs up to a megabyte on average. Consequently, the volume of all books in electronic form in the Library of Congress is close to 28 terabytes.

It is also estimated that the increase in information on the Internet, according to small estimates, is 20 terabytes of data per month.

Impressive numbers aren't they?

And what will happen if so much information is pushed into the human brain in such a short time, but it still needs to be checked for truthfulness, because if you read various messages on the Internet about one problem, then almost every author talks about this problem in different ways, or Sometimes he even contradicts himself. So what will happen to the brain in such a situation? It seems to me that it will “explode”, or the person will simply “go crazy” from all this rapidly developing information.

An information explosion is sometimes called a process that began in the middle of this century. Scientific and technological progress is the reason for this explosion, the avalanche-like growing flow of information in various fields of science and technology. This avalanche must be tamed. In our country alone there are about a million scientists working; their number on the globe is much greater. And all these millions of people, despite their efforts and desires, cannot work with the full efficiency of their brain. Because he is not able to read the literature on his specialty published in the world.

“If a chemist, fluent in 30 languages ​​(an incredible condition), began on January 1, 1964, to read all publications published that year that were of professional interest to him, and read them 40 hours a week at a rate of 4 publications per hour , then by December 31, 1964, he would have read only 1/20 of these publications,” said Academician A. N. Nesmeyanov. But since 1964, the number of publications in chemistry has increased from year to year, and now our polyglot chemist would not have read even one-thirtieth of all the literature in his specialty.

The flow of publications is increasing, and at the same time the need to read these publications is increasing every year. More and more often, engineers and technicians are turning to scientific publications. There are not millions of them in the world, but tens of millions. More than a century passed from the discovery of electric current by Galvani to the creation of the first power station. It took the telephone half a century to transform from a scientific discovery into a technical invention. But such rates characterized the 18th and 19th centuries. In our century, from the discovery of uranium nuclear fission to the creation of a nuclear reactor, only three years passed, and fifteen years passed before the launch of the first nuclear power plant. Scientific discoveries are now used almost instantly, if you measure time at the pace of past years. But, unlike in the past, searching for the necessary information in an ocean of books, articles, magazines, and patents takes a lot of time.

And not only time, but also money. Over a billion dollars are spent annually on document searches in the United States. And yet, in the same USA, at least ten percent of all funds allocated for research and development work are spent on unjustified duplication. Here are two typical examples. More than a quarter of a million dollars were spent on the cloud seeding experiment. The results of this experiment appeared in the publication, but were lost in the stream of reports and articles. And soon the experiment was repeated, and duplicating it cost three million dollars. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration spent a year and eighteen million dollars developing the Atlas Vega rocket system. At the same time, the same amount of time and money was spent on developing a similar Atlas-Agena B system, which was carried out by the United States Department of the Air Force.

It is quite clear that various companies, research institutes, ministries and departments of foreign countries spare no expense in the information service - these funds pay off handsomely.

In our country, the information service is centralized. The creation of a unified national system for collecting and processing information for accounting, planning and management is written down in the “Main Directions for the Development of the National Economy of the USSR for 1976–1980,” approved by the 25th Congress of the CPSU. The Council of Ministers of the USSR adopted a special resolution entrusting the State Committee on Science and Technology with the management of scientific and technical information in our country, the determination of the further development of the system of this information, the coordination of research and technical work, the methodological management of the entire network of scientific and technical information, the delimitation of functions between individual information bodies and control over their activities.

The network of information bodies of the USSR includes such special institutes as VINITI - All-Union Institute of Scientific and Technical Information, where thousands of staff members and tens of thousands of translators work, TsNIIPI - Central Scientific Research Institute of Patent Information, VNIIKI - All-Union Scientific Research Institute of Scientific and Technical Information , classification and coding. Each individual industry, as a rule, has its own institutes, and there are departments or bureaus of scientific and technical information in almost all reputable research and design institutes, at industrial, agricultural, transport and communications enterprises.

Forty-five years ago, futurologists predicted that by the year 2000, humanity would experience stagnation in scientific development, which would lead to the collapse of civilization.The reason for such a gloomy forecast was the brewing “information explosion.”

Ants swallowing an elephant every day

Scientists first spoke about the threat of an “information explosion” in the 60s of the 20th century. It was calculated that every ten years new results in science double, and therefore the flow of information doubles every three to four years - and in information overproduction we soon we will simply drown, unable to master the flow of new information. And this will inevitably lead to stagnation in scientific development and, ultimately, to the collapse of civilization.

There has long been a joke in the scientific community that “man is a creature whose most delicious food is information.” From these positions, our contemporary can be compared to an ant that has to swallow an elephant every day. But the year 2000 is long behind us, and, according to research, the “critical information mass” capable of blowing up the world has already quadrupled by the time we read this material. Where are the nightmarish consequences of the “information explosion”, in the epicenter of which we continue to live? Were the predictions wrong?

Let's not rush to conclusions. After all, even among scientists today there is no common opinion on this matter. Some argue that the problems have only been postponed for a while, while others argue that the disaster is happening right now, we just cannot yet fully appreciate its sad consequences. Who is right?

Waste paper factor

Our psyche, with all its unique capabilities, has limitations. It has been experimentally proven that the brain of an ordinary person is capable of perceiving and accurately processing information at a speed of no more than 25 bits per second (one word of average length contains exactly 25 bits). At such a rate of information absorption, a person can read no more than three thousand books in a lifetime. And that’s only on condition that he masters 50 pages every day.
For the most persistent, such speed once allowed them to master the basic knowledge accumulated by humanity approximately by the middle of their lives. Today, unfortunately, this is no longer possible. Just a few decades ago, a new discovery or literary work immediately attracted public attention. Now, in the scientific field alone, several million books appear annually. And even if you study exclusively recent literature, then for every page you read there will be 10 thousand others, which are impossible to master. Experts even introduced the definition of “waste paper factor” - for literature that is in zero demand (we are not just talking about works of art). German researchers conducted a study of the demand for 45 thousand scientific and technical publications in one of the Berlin libraries. And it turned out that the “waste paper factor” worked for 90 percent of these books! This means that millions of pages containing the latest technical knowledge have never been read by anyone.

In a word, we have time to study only a small fraction of the constantly accumulating information - and that’s not so bad. The problem is that the information we receive tends to quickly become outdated and requires replacement.

Half-life of current knowledge

It is this humorous, but completely scientific term that denotes a period of time during which half of the information we have acquired loses its value. And it's getting shorter. Today in higher education this period is approximately seven to ten years, and in some areas (for example, in computer technology) it has been reduced to a year. This means that if you take a computer course for 12 months, by the end of it, half of the information you received will be useless: it will be out of date. All this is reminiscent of the situation when a person climbs up a descending escalator: only a few, and even then at the cost of incredible stress, manage to maintain the required “level,” but as soon as you slow down the pace a little, and...

Today, only an “encyclopedic semi-educated person” who knows about everything, but not too deeply, can navigate the avalanche of information falling on us - and there are very few of them. Basically, wanting to avoid being “on the bottom step of the escalator,” people seek salvation in “narrow specialization” - the narrower the “narrower,” the easier it is to maintain the level. As a result, more and more people live with less and less knowledge about the world...

There is so much nonsense in the world that it’s hard to comprehend

If the brain is overstressed, it discards what is not urgently needed. Who can boast that they remember logarithms, Faraday's laws, the chemical formula of cellulose or the exact date of the reign of Vladimir II Monomakh? But we all learned this at school! We taught, but forgot - that is, we don’t know again. The situation is aggravated by the emergence of technology designed “for fools.” Devices that operate on the principle of “press a button and get the result” create the illusion of meeting the requirements of the times. We easily use technical innovations, but the subconscious reluctance to accept new information manifests itself in a kind of psychological incident: when choosing the most “sophisticated” unit, rarely does anyone try to study all its capabilities. As a result, the new product is used half-heartedly at best...
I don’t know if you have noticed that the teaching psychology has begun to change in advanced schools and institutes? Previously, pupils and students were forced to memorize everything. Today they no longer press so hard on this - it’s great if a person remembers a formula or a date, but if he easily operates with the material in which it can be found, that’s also very good. This approach seems to be a kind of solution to the problem of the “information explosion” (not to mention saving the health of our overloaded children): it is not necessary to remember everything, it is enough to learn the logic of thinking in different areas of knowledge and the ability to quickly find what you need when you need it.

Scientists offer solutions to information problems, one more fantastic than the other. For example, implanting computer microchips into the brain, which could store enormous amounts of information. However, is this really such a fantasy? With the help of implanted microchips, doctors have already managed to restore mobility to several paralyzed patients. So, it is possible that microchips with additional memory are a matter of the not-so-distant future. But no matter what scientists come up with, the reserves of our brain are still not unlimited.

It is possible that widespread alcoholism is one of the consequences of the information stress that humanity is experiencing today. This is evidenced by the results of studies conducted at the Brain Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences. Scientists have come to the conclusion that the threat of alcoholism lies primarily in those whose brains are subject to information reloads.

Experiments conducted on rats showed that animals that had to look for food in a particularly complex maze ended up preferring alcohol to water... This is worth thinking about.

Selection natural and... unnatural

To create an encyclopedia that is capable of covering all the knowledge of mankind at every moment in time, it “will need to be republished at least annually, doubling the volume of material each time. And even if the “whole world” solves this problem, who will be able to read everything that written in such a book?

Experts see a solution in strict selection and elimination of information - and this is already happening in all areas of knowledge. Indeed, such a process, for the time being, to a certain extent mitigates the consequences of the “information explosion.” But who can count how many invaluable facts have already been forgotten and discarded just because they seemed superfluous to someone? And most importantly, who is “in charge of the truth”? We should not forget that the judges in this case are ordinary people - moderately developed, moderately limited, with their own personal and departmental interests...

Simultaneously with such artificial selection of information, the process of “natural selection” occurs. Pop culture is replacing culture. The Bible in comics and abridged versions of classic works are being released onto the market. There is an unspoken ban on television - not to say anything smart that goes beyond the knowledge of the “average” viewer. Subtle humor is replaced by "jokes", the poetry of romances - by cheap "jagi-jagi", refined speech - by slang. And radio and television presenters very naturally maintain a general low level, confusing cases and losing the thread of the conversation...

Perhaps futurologists of the 60s of the last century called all this the end of our civilization?

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Information overload. Information explosion. Ineffective thinking. Ambulance.

“Less is more” is the best saying that can be said about information now. There is so much of it that your head is spinning. The volume of information doubles every 18 months. In 2002, humanity produced 18∙10 18 bytes (18 Exabytes) of information, or just over 18 billion gigabytes.

In this short post I want to draw attention to information overload syndromes and precautions when handling information. There is another catchphrase by N.M. Rodshtld: “Who owns the information, owns the World.” He, of course, meant the outside world. We will consider the inner world. Undoubtedly, you will agree that you need to have your own king in your head, unless, of course, you want to be owned by all sorts of Rodshelds.

What is information overload

The definition of Information Overload was first coined by City University London information science professor David Bawden in a 2008 study entitled The dark side of information: overload, anxiety and other paradoxes and pathologies. anxiety and other paradoxes and pathologies). It was co-authored by Bowden’s university colleague, Doctor of Computer Science Lyn Robinson, who studies the impact of received information on human behavior.

Bowden and Robinson defined information overload as “a state of civilization in which the volume of potentially useful and relevant information exceeds the average person's ability to process it and becomes a hindrance rather than an aid.” A simple example. A person needs to build a house, but he does not build it because he is hopelessly stuck at the stage of learning information about how to build a house.

Types of information overload

1. Information vampirism - dependence on information received via the Internet or television. A person does not look up from the TV or get out of the global network, which essentially takes the form of an escape from personal problems and compensation for life's unsettledness. This is similar to any chemical addiction - alcoholism, drug addiction and other addictions.

2. Multitasking - the need to do several things at the same time. But, as has been experimentally proven more than once, at one point in time a person can do only one thing, keeping from 5 to 7 elements in short-term memory. In such an atmosphere, a person spends much more energy switching attention between objects of concentration than on the work itself, because each time you switch, you have to refresh your memory. This is similar to how the RAM of a computer or phone works, when switching between applications, they are frequently updated. About this type of information overload, we can say that a person only “pretends to work”, since his productivity is low.

3. Obtaining facts is a situation in which, on the way to useful and valuable information, you need to “shove through” a huge amount of information, and facts accumulate, but are not assimilated. This “kurkul” approach is also dangerous, since it inevitably turns all potentially useful information into useless trash (not applied).

Information explosion.

Information in the modern world is accumulating at an alarming rate - according to Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, “From the beginning of civilization until 2003, about 5 Exabytes (5,000,000,000 GB) of information were created. Now humanity creates so much data in just 2 days.”

The digital Universe is growing faster than expected in the wildest forecasts: experts from the analytical firm International Data Corporation (IDC) assumed that by the beginning of 2011 humanity would have accumulated up to 1.8 ZB of information, but a large-scale study by ICANN revealed the presence of 2.56 Zettabytes of digital data in the world already in September of the same year. Note that a much earlier study by Bohn and Short, who indicated an information consumption volume of 3.6 Zettabytes for the United States alone, took into account repeated user access to the same traffic source (for example, multiplayer game servers).

The volume of information in the world increases annually by 30%. On average, 2.5∙10 8 bytes are produced per person per year in the world.

Meditation is perhaps the most effective method of emo-information cleansing and first aid when experiencing acute information-emotional overload. Go, download, do it. There will be a lot more useful if you subscribe to the newsletter. No spam.

By the way, it will be useful to know that our body has a self-defense system against extreme emotional irritation. It's called "stupor". If we compare the psyche with a car, then the stupor will correspond to braking “with the wheels completely locked.” A less pronounced form of stupor - “mild slowing down” - is a depression that many people love. Depression is a less pronounced reaction to information overload.

Here are some tips that can help you maintain your current order in your head.

• Collect only useful information. Don't try to find out everything about everything: at the current rate of information production, this is impossible.
• Be honest with yourself. If something is bothering you, don’t drown your anxiety in a sea of ​​unnecessary information.
• Don't take on several things at once, work on your tasks one at a time.
• Plan your time, highlight important and minor, urgent and not urgent tasks.
• Maintain a balance between work and rest, get enough sleep and rest (this is the most difficult thing).
• Take advantage of the wonderful property of the brain - to forget everything unnecessary and self-cleanse.

And finally, a few more interesting facts:

According to experts, there is about 1 petabyte of text information on the entire Internet, as well as everything written by humans, articles, books, textbooks, etc. At the same time, the volume of brain memory, according to various estimates, is about a zettabyte. However, a person cannot be considered as a storage device, such as a flash drive, because he can create information on his own, be its source. Flash drives and computers are not capable of this, so this comparison is unacceptable. And in general, all information exists because of human existence. He is the center, the source, the user.

• information overload causes serious stress and leads to overall poor health,
• and excessive use of social media can even lead to short-term memory loss!

Avoid information overload whenever possible. Forewarned is forearmed.