"Information Overload"
Drowning in data, anti-intelligence agencies
and a collision with the real world...
by Bill Bonner
“Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the
hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted
other men with machines to enslave them.”
- Frank Herbert, Dune
Youghal, Ireland - “After 20 years, I moved from NYC to Florida…” “Karen moments caught on security cameras…” “Meet the ‘trans-apostate’…” These are actual ‘news’ items we got this morning. Will they enrich our lives?
In today’s news, also, comes this from Bloomberg describing why ‘information’ will not make us rich: "There’s So Much Data Even Spies Are Struggling to Find Secrets." "Scouring open-source intelligence may not have the same cachet as undercover work, but it’s become a new priority for the US intelligence agencies. Spying used to be all about secrets. Increasingly, it’s about what’s hiding in plain sight. A staggering amount of data, from Facebook posts and YouTube clips to location pings from mobile phones and car apps, sits in the open internet, available to anyone who looks.
Why didn’t America’s spies warn us about 9/11? Why didn’t (apparently) Israel’s intel agencies (said to be the best in the world) warn about the Hamas attack; it was (apparently) ‘hiding in plain sight? One possibility, the spooks had too much information! With the right information at the right time, you can make money on Wall Street…or blackmail a politician.
Bad Intel - But any information that you don’t really need, when you don’t really need it, absorbs time and energy. It must be sorted, assayed, and stored. Much of it is false. Much is misleading. Much is just useless. But you have to figure out which is what. And while you are doing that you miss your daughter’s birthday party and the beginning of WWIII.
America is said to have 17 different ‘intelligence’ agencies, costing billions of dollars – trafficking in information. Has any one of them ever produced an important insight…an important piece of ‘intel’ that actually made our lives better? We don’t know. It’s classified information!
So, today, we turn to our senses – sight, sound, smell, taste and touch. We look around. We see steel in our kitchen faucet…refrigerator…screws…pipes…hinges and so forth. We feel energy…natural gas, which heats our water…rushing through the radiators (steel!) and under the floor (concrete…with stone laid on top). We sense the radiant heat too, coming from a fireplace made of bricks…burning wood, cut with a chainsaw, fueled with gasoline.
Wood is all around us. The chairs. The shelves. Tables…framing for the house itself. On the shelves are books…paper, made from trees. Out the window, we see the lawn – cut with a gasoline-powered mower – stone walls that required lime mortar (made by burning limestone under high heat).
Oh, when we sit down to lunch…what do we eat? Electrons? Information? Techno-faux beef a la Silicon Valley? No, we eat vegetables…meat…soup …eggs. Things that come from plants and animals…things we can see, smell and taste. We drink wine from Italy and coffee from Ethiopia (brought to us on ships and trucks powered by oil).
We sit in comfort on fabrics designed by artists, and rendered in wool (from sheep!) in factories and workshops. We listen to music produced by musicians…and correspond with friends and associates via the internet.
The Information Intersection - And here is where our lives intersect with the Magnificent Seven and the ‘Information Age.’ Many of the things we see and hear nowadays are brought to us electronically…in tiny pieces of information that are reassembled to make something we recognize.
Musicians and composers make music – the product of hundreds of years of innovation in tunes, rhythms, and musical instruments. They are recorded electronically, and sent to us on ‘apps’ that run on our laptop computer, with software and hardware produced by various tech companies. So do movies involve huge investments of time, talent and real resources to make something worth our time, which is then made available to us via Netflix or other service.
The ultimate scarce resource is, of course, time. The new Information Age is a gourmand for time. It gobbles up as much as we allow. The spooks aren’t the only ones who are deluged by information. We all are. Ads. Opinions. Jokes. Lies. You can spend all your time just taking them in and trying to make sense of them. You benefit from the occasional bit of useful info and entertainment. But you lose, too, as the most precious thing you have – your time –flits away. We measure out our lives on Tik Tok and Youtube.
More of a Bad Thing: Here at the BPR headquarters in Ireland, the things we most appreciate are those in range of our senses…things we see, eat, and use. The electronic world is just a tool. We spend much of our day…reading…writing …researching with the help of Google…Microsoft…and other companies.
And now we are told that AI will be a great time saver. It will set us free from the tyranny of the Information Revolution. It will know what we should read…and what we shouldn’t. It will help us write up our thoughts…and correct our errors and political misjudgments. With AI, we’ll take back our lives. Maybe, as suggested yesterday in a headline at Bloomberg, it will ‘make us better humans’ by scouring ‘bad’ thoughts out of our brains. “Siri,” we will say” speaking to an empty room. “What’s important today? What’s the news? What does it mean? What should I think about it?” And glory of glories…laudate dominum…we’ll have more ‘intel’ to think about! Another source of information! Another jackass opinion from a mindless object!
Omnes gentes, Hallelujah."
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