IAN MORRIS: INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

Information processing is critical to social development.

Moore's Law: the cost-effectiveness of information technology has doubled every 18 months or so since 1950.
But that, of course, would overlook both the flexibility of old-fashioned forms of information storage such as printed books and changes over time in access to the most advanced techniques.

The correct ratio between modern and earlier information technology is much less than a billion to one, though it is clearly enormous, with the consequence that pre-1900 scores (and margins of error) are even tinier than in the case of war-making.

Thanks to new technologies, information technology surged eightyfold, while energy capture per person merely doubled.

Most mind-boggling of all are the changes in information technology. The 20th century took us from crude radios and telephones to the Internet; it is not so far-fetched to suggest that the 21st (century) will give everyone in the developed cores instant access to and total recall of all the information in the world, their brains networked like --or into-- a giant computer, with calculating power trillions of times greater than the sum of all brains and machines in our own time.

All these things, of course, sound impossible. Merging our minds with machines -- well, we would cease to be human.

Hard as it is to get our minds around the idea, the trends of the last couple of centuries are leading towards a change in what it means to be human, making possible the science-fiction kinds of information technology implied by social development scores of five thousand points.