A thought-provoking article. However, it's not at all clear to me why having a more informational economy is beneficial per se. Because the non-incremental change - or power law change - can work both ways, up and down.
Take the financial system for instance. Finance is one of the most "informationized" industries, with news coming in fast at Bloomberg terminals, ubiquitous access via smart phones, and thousands of trading orders executed every second. Yes, a system becomes more efficient the less (physical) constraints it has, but it also gets less robust. At the core of this problem is that we don't really understand non-incremental change due to the properties of information and a whole host of cognitive biases.
Therefore, I'd like to see a distinction being made to cases where the informationization is beneficial, and where it is detrimental. It's a good thing in industries where there's mostly exposure to positive non-incremental change (e.g. Internet businesses, biotech), but otherwise not.
You bring up a very good point. Actually, I think this issue warrants an entire blog post in response. I think there are indeed huge dangers in informationization that could be catastrophic.
So I guess we need to determine whether informationization is a force that can be stopped, and if it's not, what can we do to minimize catastrophic failure. One thing could be to have certain physical/static baselines to fall back to (like shelters, food, minimum levels of non-liquid wealth). Or convert some of NNT's black-swan heuristics into well known practices (e.g. "Learn to be redundant, don’t be optimal.", "have small losses if you are wrong, and big profits if you are right", etc.)
I haven't put a lot of thought into the risks and downsides of informationization actually, and perhaps not enough people out there aren't either. At this year's Singularity Summit there was a real lack of skepticism and interest in debating some of these core downsides and dangers.
Really nice article. Knowledge as an industry must mostly play a supportive role to the physical world of oil, food production, building and maintaining infrastructure, etc.
Most people probably don't like to think about this, but at least in the USA we are looking at a major transformation in our society. IMO, either our government will go bankrupt or inflate the value of the dollar towards zero.
This economic trend will certainly force us (eventually) to take a hard look on IT spending, military spending, etc. to evaluate what value we get for spent resources. I also expect our society to decentralize as unemployed/under-employed get involved in local food production, etc. The future does not frighten me, and will probably be very interesting to live through, but things will change a lot in the next ten years.
Take the financial system for instance. Finance is one of the most "informationized" industries, with news coming in fast at Bloomberg terminals, ubiquitous access via smart phones, and thousands of trading orders executed every second. Yes, a system becomes more efficient the less (physical) constraints it has, but it also gets less robust. At the core of this problem is that we don't really understand non-incremental change due to the properties of information and a whole host of cognitive biases.
Therefore, I'd like to see a distinction being made to cases where the informationization is beneficial, and where it is detrimental. It's a good thing in industries where there's mostly exposure to positive non-incremental change (e.g. Internet businesses, biotech), but otherwise not.