Consider how much memory there would be in the form of computer storage if all storage was done on silicon chips and all the silicon in the world was used up.
Of course, this could not happen because it would require the processing of massive amounts of sand to get the silicon and there would certainly come a point where the extraction of the silicon would become an unfeasible proposition.
The storage could be done another way, but what? There are two factors: storage and access speed. Provided that storage is done on silicon chips, this implies that the world has a finite ability to store information. An interesting thought. Worth a whiskey.
While thinking along these lines, I was considering Shannon’s law of information transmission. I am sure you are all completely familiar with this but, for those of you who have never heard of Shannon’s law, it states: “The maximum of information that can be transmitted in a given time is proportional to the rate of transmission multiplied by the bandwidth multiplied by the logarithm of the signal-to-noise ratio.”
This law is preceded by an analysis of what constitutes information. Consider two airheads who know absolutely nothing (just go to any bar in Cape Town). In front of Airhead One is a box that contains text written on pieces of card. The text on each piece of card is a known fact. Airhead One picks a card out at random and reads it out to Airhead Two, who, on hearing the fact, writes it down in a book. Airhead One then returns the card into the box and again picks out a card at random. The information content of Airhead Two increases slowly until Airhead One picks out a card and reads it out but the card has, in fact, been read out before.
The information content of Airhead Two’s brain is, thus, the probability that Airhead Two will, out of all the messages that Airhead One can send, get a message that has not been sent before. When this probability is 1, then Airhead Two’s information content is 100%.
I hope I have not gone too fast for you. But just read what I have written and consider this: the average person has access to any number of search engines on their cellphone. Thus, it is no longer necessary for anybody to remember anything other than information unlikely to be found on the Internet (for example, that I have four dogs and a sauna, and I sleep on the left-hand side of the bed and I do not drink beer or wine, et cetera, et cetera). But everything else is available at the touch of a button: multiplication tables, conversion from kilometres to miles, the street addresses of businesses in Cape Town and worldwide, the telephone numbers of any number of people, and so on.
Thus, the average person is given a whole lot of freed-up memory to use because the cellphone stores all the trivia. This implies that we are on the cusp of a great intellectual leap forward, specifically because, in the example above, information was being stored on the brain of Airhead Two. Now, if information is stored on a cellphone and easily retrieved, then the information content of the average person is greatly increased.
Previously, before the advent of the smartphone age, there was never enough space for one person to accumulate enough information to solve a specific problem – such as how to get gold from base metals, what to do about the bullfights in Spain and how to get black and white people to live together in peace and harmony.
These problems could not be solved by one person because of finite brain capacity. These and many others were referred to groups of people, who shared their spare brain capacity to try to solve the problems. But the problems were never effectively solved because committees can never agree on solutions and always make compromises that do not work. But now this need not happen. I am looking forward to an information-rich future. All the problems of the world solved. Wonderful.