At the pinnacle
Humanity stands at the pinnacle of the animal kingdom. We are not the fastest, strongest, or even the most suited to survive in extreme temperatures. Our position at the top depends on one thing: our ability to record, analyze, and consume information.
Human and Information
Our relationship with information has been with us since the dawn of our history. Communication among members of the same tribe to find sources of food, to coordinate hunting of animals stronger than us. Establishing a social hierarchy to facilitate decision-making. An intimate relationship with information has defined us since the dawn of our development.
Transmission of experience through word
The development of our language to such a complex level has allowed us to share complex information among ourselves, giving us an edge over our competitors in the animal kingdom. Sharing precise information about the location of food sources, potential dangers, and their nature to prepare us to face them. The human brain possesses a quality; it is unable to distinguish between what is real and what is not. So when we hear about an experience, our brain receives it as if we had experienced it ourselves. Thus, through communication, humans have the ability to exchange experiences with their peers. I do not need to face a predator myself to be aware of its existence. Once one of my peers has experienced and survived such an encounter and shares it with me, I can receive the experience myself.
The development of our written language from the inception of our civilization through cave scriptures. Its evolution into the complex language we know today enables us to express complex ideas and share them to achieve results. The construction of roads has allowed us to network diverse cultures and ensure transmission at cultural, ideological, and practical levels.
Roads, the first network
Roads are often underestimated tools in their role of conveying information, yet they have played significant roles. The Silk Road allowed inventions such as paper to spread westward. Paper became the primary tool for recording symbols carrying communication and ideas. This route, where members of various cultures met, allowed these cultures to be exposed to new ideas and ways of thinking. This route also facilitated the discovery of new products and the dissemination of packages carrying products that would revolutionize life in different nodes of the road network.
Transmission of experience through written language
The Library of Alexandria, a hub of knowledge, endeavored to stock a copy of every book that existed at the time and to provide conditions for the great minds of the time to produce more. The Library of Alexandria was then a place where one could go to be exposed to, explore, and encounter a multitude of ideas. Perhaps here we face one of our earliest cases of censorship, where each great civilization, each government, judged certain writings as false and insulting to their faith and censored their access and use.
The printing press
The rarity of manuscripts and the time it took scribes to reproduce scrolls surely facilitated the censorship of these texts. The invention of the printing press, which allowed unprecedented speed in reproducing written documents, would have posed a different challenge to this censorship. The speed of replication of these documents greatly increased the contact surface of these ideas with the population. Previously rare books containing rare information and ideas capable of revolutionizing the way citizens think were published, copies numbering in the hundreds where monks and qualified personnel in calligraphy were needed to copy these books; the printing press sufficed to reproduce these symbols carrying so much meaning.
This was undoubtedly a key element in the creation of universities where great thinkers gathered to share and debate ideas and interpretations of received information.
Books, however, were a rare commodity that many could not afford.
The Internet
While the printing press gave us a greater exposure in terms of the number of people who had access to books, it was nothing compared to the invention of the internet. A book had to travel the roads, cross the sea, on a ship or by plane to expose its content to new brains, whereas with the internet, the transmission of writing was almost instantaneous in comparison.
This new access to information would completely change the pace of our evolution at a speed never seen before. And this pace continues to accelerate; it took Facebook 4 years and 6 months to reach one million users, it took WhatsApp 3 years and 6 months to do the same, Instagram only took 2 years and 6 months, and TikTok 9 months. We can note that the speed of adoption and consumption of new information is only increasing.
But not only has our consumption speed increased, the quantity of information we produce has also experienced considerable growth. Between the millions of text messages received and sent, the millions of photos and videos taken every day, our consumption and processing speed seems to exceed our processing capacities but not anymore. In recent years, we have seen the rise of artificial intelligence, a brain outside of our brain capable of processing unimaginable volumes of information in record time. We seem to be at the dawn of a new era where changes and the adoption of new ideas seem to occur in a matter of days, months, not years and decades as was the case before. The sun rises on a new era of information, and we will all bear witness…
