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Visions of the Information Future
From: The British Library
| By:
Richard Wakeford |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
Today, information technology allows us to keep better records of human knowledge than ever before. Yet what will happen as that knowledge, and our record keeping, proliferates? Are there natural laws that govern the "life span" of information records? Richard Wakeford of the British Library here offers a helpful model for understanding this problem; by combining Richard Dawkins's concept of the meme--a self-replicating unit of culture--with Darwin's ideas on natural selection, we may begin to sketch laws governing the material life of recorded information. |
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| Charles Darwin. | |
 he future is a foreign country" and the landmarks there are few and unhelpful. That said, can we map out how human knowledge will change over time? I want to show that there is a simple key to understanding the future of knowledge in its recorded form, and it lies in the fact that information of any sort replicates itself. This means that at a fundamental level we can see the logic of Darwinian natural selection governing human records in the same way as it governs biological systems. Moreover, the similarity deepens when we consider the digital nature of both records and the genetic code. |
The meme: culture imitates biology
The idea that culture and language form a system of extrasomatic inheritance subject to evolution is not a new one, and goes back at least to Charles Darwin. More recently, Richard Dawkins introduced the concept of the meme, which, by analogy with the gene, is a unit of self-replicating cultural evolution, a distinct memory, idea or behavior, which resides in the mind and spreads between minds. It is when the memes emerge from the mind in physical form that we can look for the Darwinian rules at work. |
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| The "Wicked Bible". | |
Memes spread either through written records (e.g., chain letters, the propagation of Bibles, or best-selling novels), by speech (e.g., epic poems told by bards, children's playground rhymes or the "living books" of Ray Bradbury's novel Fahrenheit 451), through objects (e.g., the craze for yo-yos, the spread of the wheel in prehistoric times) or by actions (e.g., dance fashions). Memes that employ a digital code, such as alphanumeric text or musical notation, are a special case, as they can be copied with very high fidelity in the same way as genes are in replication. Mutations are rare, and when they occur they often are selected out of the population--as, for example, happened to the short-lived "Wicked Bible" in which the Seventh Commandment says "thou shalt commit adultery," whereupon all copies were burnt on the order of Charles I. So perhaps one way to think about a high-fidelity meme is as the basis of a unit of "copyrightability." |
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| Defunct computers. | |
It is easy to take reliable copies for granted, but it is a remarkable fact that high-fidelity replication creates long lineages in which ancestors and descendants are identical even though separated by many generations. Some genes, exposed to intense selection, have passed down essentially unchanged for millions and even billions of years. In the same way, canonical texts such as the Bible or those by classical authors, selected through constant reading and criticism, have come down to us after hundreds or thousands of years. Memes that act as sources of textual authority and are supported by high-fidelity replication are in a way comparable to the animal germ line, the source of hereditary material that is protected from mutation and kept ready for transmission to the next generation. In contrast, memes, which are transmitted by low-fidelity replication or analogue media such as gossip, visual demonstration, diagrams and sketches, lack a source of textual authority and are liable to recombine and mutate to create new and stimulating patterns. Memes of all kinds are, however, intimately related and constantly interplay with one another. As the saying goes, "A scholar is just a library's way of making another library." |
Darwin in the information age
Memes that live in a Darwinian world compete and adapt to their environment. As Daniel Dennett has written, "The normal state of affairs for any sort of reproducer is one in which more offspring are reproduced in any one generation than will reproduce in the next. In other words it is nearly always crunch time." The population of texts continually threatens to outstrip the available space on shelves, hard discs or publishers' lists. Selection is intense for, of the 105 or so books published in English every year, only a few prove sufficiently adapted to popular interest and fashion to be reprinted or to succeed in becoming second editions. Of these, only a tiny fraction will eventually become established with a "classic" status. Immortality for the few is purchased at the price of extinction of the many, and as one biologist put it, "to a first approximation all species are extinct." |
The history of organisms is marked by mass extinctions, periodic storms that leave few survivors, and by background extinction, a slower process of attrition of biodiversity. Both patterns seem to have parallels in the world of high-fidelity memes. When the Dark Ages overtook the culture of the classical world, few authors survived, and it is a shock to think of the riches now lost that were described in the 120 scrolls of the catalogue of the Library of Alexandria. On a day-to-day level, the stock of any library is threatened by deletion, physical decay, acts of God, neglect and human destructiveness. Some media, especially magnetic storage, decay after a few years, wood-pulp paper fragments after a few centuries, and acid-free paper may last for a few millennia. Libraries are notoriously at risk from fire, and unfortunately people from time to time consign books to the flames. Texts which are important on first appearance or printed in many copies have no lasting protection against extinction. Already many of NASA's magnetic tape records of the space programme have decayed and are inaccessible. One of the world's all-time top 10 best-sellers, a curious business publication called Message to Garcia, with 50 million copies printed since 1899, is today unread and reduced to a few copies held in national libraries. It has, though, been recently revived by publication on the Web. Will low-cost electronic storage media provide the solution to storing everything in perpetuity? Probably not--the mechanics of archiving are problematic--and digital information is being produced at an explosive rate. A recent review has described the pressures facing producers of large scientific databases, who |
"are already bracing themselves for what they call the exabyte challenge (1,000 petabytes = 1018 bytes). All the words ever spoken by human beings amount to about 5 exabytes. In case we need them, and we probably will soon, terms have been coined for 1,000 exabytes (a zettabyte = 1021 bytes) and 1,000 zettabytes (a yottabyte = 1024 bytes)." |
If replication is the criterion of life, then extinction comes soon to most high-fidelity memes in the sense that they become unread, uncopied and unloved, but for the final physical destruction of the last copy in the last library of last resort we must look to a more distant future. What is the scale of this future? The past is our only guide. We have inherited our corpus of texts over the last 1,500 years or so; urban civilization has been around for some 10,000 years, culture in the broadest sense has been with us for some 35,000 years and our species is about 100,000 years old. Can we envisage information being transmitted over timescales of the order of 100,000 years? |
Picture, if you will, an orderly queue of our descendants; children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, etc., stretching into the distance. Each individual is a child of the one before and a parent to the one after. Allowing 25 years for a generation, then our 4,000 lineal descendants would form a line some 4 kilometers long, say, from the British Library at St. Pancras to (aptly enough) the Natural History Museum at South Kensington. Now the information future seems to be becoming a more tractable vision. Imagine each parent writing and passing a note to each child with the instruction to copy the note and pass it on down the queue, together with a second instruction to write a new note. The first few of our descendants in the queue cope with the stream of paper, but soon bottlenecks develop, pockets and handbags overflow and paper is thrown away. Interesting notes are retained and notes of no importance are discarded, but the process is haphazard and local decisions are taken regardless of the long-range consequences. But the final question of the information future remains: Will any records succeed in traveling down to our remotest descendants as high-fidelity memes, or, in time, is all knowledge destined for extinction? |
Is there an end to information?
Beyond the 100,000-year horizon the deep future is wrapped in mystery. Maybe the brain and mental functions of mankind will evolve, or we may enter into some form of direct symbiosis with machines. If we achieve sustainability to become a very long-lived race, we can look forward to an inhabitable Earth for the next few billion years, but eventually we will be forced to pack our books and emigrate, for the sun will age and die. Maybe robots will take our place, as in John von Neumann's vision of space seeded with self-reproducing automata spreading the message from Earth to the far corners of the galaxy and beyond. Recently, however, our view of the long-term future has become clearer and immortality no longer seems to be an option. Astronomical observations are coming to support the hypothesis that the universe will expand forever rather than end in a Big Crunch. The warm phase of the universe, rich in stars, will last for only another 1012 years. After that time the universe becomes increasingly dark and cold as matter is consumed by black holes. Eventually, the "empty era" begins, in which black holes evaporate and the last remaining particles decay in around 10120 years. Beyond that point physics is silent. If this model is valid, then our friendly universe with all the possibilities for life and other complex information-rich systems will turn out to have been an interesting but rather temporary affair. |
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