Facing the Inflationary Info-verse

We are having to cope with knowing less and less

In college Physics I studied inflation theory, which is part of cosmology. The basic idea is that there was a brief period just after the big bang when the universe expanded so quickly that the speed of light wasn’t sufficient to allow things to mix and come to equilibrium, and as a consequence created large-scale structures (like clusters of galaxies) that we still see today. If you had been an observer around at that time, you’d have seen distant stars disappearing from your sight - crossing and leaving the ‘event horizon’ of the farthest things whose light could reach you. The universe was expanding faster than information could propagate across it.

A similar thing is happening today, where the speed of light is replaced by the very finite speed at which we can take in and make sense of information. The world, mostly because of compounding advances in technology, is creating new and material information much more rapidly than we can understand it. In an oversimplified limit, imagine that every important thing that happens in the world can be captured in a single one hour podcast. We could all spend an hour listening and then have plenty of time to digest what we heard and decide what it means for each of us. But what happens when that podcast becomes six hours long, or one hundred hours? At that point we can no longer stay in real time. Details about what is going on recede into the distance and eventually cross the ‘information horizon’ containing all the knowledge we can hold. We are condemned by our finite capacity to know less and less about the increasingly complex world around us.

A recent example: An acquaintance of mine is a very capable engineer working on AI, in the bay area. Yesterday we caught up after not having seen each other for a couple of months. I brought up a popular topic in AI that has been very prominent in the news I’ve been reading that I was sure he’d have a perspective on… and he hadn’t yet even heard of it! Now this is a young professional working night and day on AI software. In 1994, by comparison - when the internet and my career started - everyone working on it knew most everything about it. From routers to protocols to web servers to browsers and most every interesting application that was being built with those basic components, we were all reasonably up to speed. But AI is moving forward so rapidly that not only can no human follow all the details of it, they can’t even keep track of all the major sub-categories of work. And it isn’t just AI. What are all the important things happening in alternative energy, or flying vehicles, or space exploration? There are way, way too many for any one person to follow. And the rate of change is steadily increasing.

The concern I want to bring up here isn’t related to the quality of our work in the face of this challenge, but rather the negative impact on our relationship to and communication with others. Faced with a larger and larger universe of information of which we can choose to sample only a smaller and smaller fraction, we will on average share less and less information with others we meet. Shared context is critical to establishing trust and cooperation. Even if we all delightedly explore whatever subset of everything that is happening we care too, we will feel less connected to others because we will have less and less in common.

There are many different ways to adapt to this, but it seems important to highlight the risk. Gradually turning up the information rate feels like a slow-frog-boiling sort of situation. One class of solution is finding better ways to signal where there are overlaps in our information consumption with others. What if I could know that someone I just met is also a devoted reader of the Economist, for example? Or that we both share a prior employer, or university, or home town? Another solution is to periodically meet face-to-face or online with the same group of people, knowing then that whatever shared discussion happened last time can be used as a common bond to start the next one. Or intentionally making a pact with a group of strangers to read only the same source of information and then discuss - as is done in book clubs. Another direction - that might be happening with ‘hacker houses’ in San Francisco - could be to use physical proximity and co-living as a means to bond and cohere in the face of declining overlap in shared information.

Does this make sense? What other coping strategies come to mind?