IT – Information Turmoil

It is fair to say, perhaps not even debatable anymore, that today, as never before, we in the developed areas of the world are confronted with just too much information, too much for our own good, and simply too much for a well-ordered life in the future. Is information over load an example of too much of a good thing? Are we being driven towards a path of total dependence on information technology? Is information technology’s advance infinitely self-sustaining, indomitably inextinguishable? If information made life possible in the beginning, can too much of it stifle our way of lives in the future, or will a sudden absence of it be both existentially and sociologically paralyzing.

Those are not trivial questions to ask. Imagine for a moment that tomorrow, without warning, every communication satellite is disabled. It will be described no less than one massive global information cardiac arrest. Is it highly unlikely, or never to happen?

Think about the following true events:

a.)    One late afternoon on August 14, 2003, a widespread power outage affected Northeastern and Midwestern U.S. and the province of Ontario, Canada. Late that night some power was restored but it took a whole week everywhere else, especially in rural areas, for restoration to complete. “The blackout's primary cause was a software bug in the alarm system at a control room of the First Energy Corporation, located in Ohio. A lack of alarm left operators unaware of the need to re-distribute power after overloaded transmission lines hit unpruned foliage, which triggered a race condition in the control software. What would have been a manageable local blackout cascaded into massive widespread distress on the electric grid”.

b.)    On Nov. 9, 1965 30 million people over an area of 80,000 sq. miles in the Northeast and Ontario, Canada lost power completely for 13 hours.  Ontario is vulnerable, again, because of its proximity to the Niagara generating stations.  Human error was cause of the outage.  “The safety relay, which was to trip if the current exceeded the capacity of the transmission line, was set too low”.

c.)     On March 11, 1999 up to 90 million Brazilians were treated to a total power blackout, “when a lightning strike occurred at 22h 16m at an electricity substation in Bauru, São Paulo State causing most of the 440kV circuits at the substation to trip”.

All of the above occurred during peace time.  What would it be like in times of a major military conflict? Let’s not go there because the mere thought of it will give anyone even with the remotest hint of paranoia a most paralyzing distress or unimaginable trepidation. Sometime in 1876, after the telegraph had changed how information was propagated, the telephone was invented.  Both changed in very dramatic fashion how people communicated. It was the beginning of the age of information technology.  

But lest we forget, both of those inventions and everything else that followed in its wake were dependent on one thing – electric energy. The new technology’s life blood and its Achilles heel is electricity.  Whether from land line or stored from batteries, information technology’s umbilical cord can never be detached from electrical power. And there lies the problem. And there is something even more insidious – modern society is seduced into believing that information technology has the solution to everything. But along with this is the evil misuse of the technology to stream live criminal acts of violence and widespread cyber bullying.

Theologians and non-believers look at the first verse, Chapter I, of the Book of John in the New Testament from two different views, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The atheist makes a substitution, “In the beginning was the information, and the information was with God, and the information was God”.

Here’s how I interpret the biologist’s take on information.  Life as we know it begun with information. The only way for the first single cell organism to survive was to capitalize on information. What linked the primordial nucleus to the external cell membrane was information. The rudimentary brain that was the nucleus depended on that information to make the first synthesis that made life possible. It cascaded from there when everything from the environment, the presence of nutrients, suitable locations, threats and allies were crucial to survival that allowed for organisms to flourish, diversify, evolve to complexity, etc.  Billions of years of evolution depended solely on the use of information.  Think about it. Plants, which by the way are the first living organisms, must recognize the orientation of their location towards sunlight, their roots must know where the water is, nutrients from the soil must be identified, and all of these traits depend on, you guessed it – information.

Before we get to the highly sophisticated information at the human level, we must look back to where it all started. Information was a key sustaining component to the origin of life and, this is important to note, information evolved along with it. Think about it. From the earliest microbes to worms to lizards and amphibians, etc., every species had to rely on it to find food, shelter, and survive. Wolves howl to establish their presence and communicate the extent of their territory. Scent marking surpasses short- lived howls, growls, hisses and all kinds of temporary vocalization. Scents preserved information over a period of time. Fast forward to early human development and information took a dramatic leap when growls and gestures were organized into repeatable vocalization that led to language. Language led to written records. Written records led to another dramatic leap towards the unprecedented explosion of knowledge.

So then man needed to extend the reach of communication.  Where tom-toms and smoke signals begun, the written text made information not only readily available for widespread use, it preserved the usefulness of it indefinitely.  But word of mouth dissemination never stopped.  When gossip took days to spread over a typical village, weeks to cover a typical town, the telephone shortened the distance between people and communities to mere millimeters from the mouth and ear pieces of a gadget invented in 1876.

Just as in any evolutionary processes in biology where traits and even physical organs and extremities were discarded in favor of newer ones that allowed for species to adapt and flourish, technology in communication went through the same path of elimination.  Semaphore flags, ships’ signal lamps, the telegraph and fax machines, camera film rolls and a few others are featured as museum pieces now after giving way to today’s ubiquitous smart phones, tablets, laptops, digital cameras, etc. And these new ones we embrace now so dearly hold them loosely, because they too will not be immune from “who-knows-what” just waiting beyond the next breakthrough.

Alas, information came with the good and the bad. Consider this. Joseph Goebbels was Reich Minister of Propaganda in the Nazi Germany. Propaganda at that time did not have such a bad connotation. The word’s etymology in fact comes from, “that which ought to be spread”, as in propagate, not for carrying out misleading information, as we know it today.  Much earlier, Pope Gregory XV founded the “Congregatio de Propaganda Fide” (“Congregation for propagating the Faith”). In either case, the whole idea was to spread information, good or bad.

Today, we have ministers of information, press secretaries and spokesperson for one department or another, for a cause or any entity that needs speaking for on its behalf. Today, the media is barely above the Congress’ and politicians’ poll numbers.  And it has come to this – the emergence of fake news! The web, the twitter world, Facebook and everything associated with the propagation of information have become instantaneous bulletin boards for everything, or from anyone and from whoever has a story or agenda to propagate.  Urban legend, that foreshadowed the coming out of fake news, used to take months, years, even a generation to spread. The run-of-the-mill gossip by word of mouth, the echo of the tom-tom and the skyward sight of the smoke signal were all the different contrails that information took.  Today, by any name, these things spread with the “speed of summer lightning”.

It seems that there is so little we can do to consume all these knowledge.  There is only so much the brain can take.  A whirlpool of information hits us every day and there will come a time when the overload starts numbing the brain into mental apathy.  Our brain is able to cope because we’ve managed to outsource some of what it used to do. Our children are being unburdened from mastering the multiplication table, calculating for the square root of a number, and even the simple tasks of addition and subtraction are sub-contracted to the $2 calculator. Mastering, let alone, understanding differential and integral calculus will make no difference to sociology and math majors.

If information evolved with our biology, the reverse can happen when biology starts evolving with it. A hundred generations from now, if we ever get there, science text books will explain how texting made us grow out-sized thumbs to make lobsters jealous, how our nape muscles will rival those of the musk ox from prolonged hunched postures over our smart phones. Our peripheral visions will have shifted to scan up and down thus vertically elongating the pupils like a civet cat’s.

Well, it may not come to that because technology will not stand still long enough for evolution to dictate a specific adaptation of particular body parts.  But some things can be predicted more accurately.

The pen and pencil industry will suffer the most.  Good penmanship will be archived as masterpieces hanging in museums (where there is no need for foot traffic because everything is either virtually viewed or downloaded).  Intimate conversation could truly become a lost art. The brain will downsize as more and more of the mental tasks are relegated to the intelligence of silicon wafers the size of a pinhead.  We will become physically frail as robots do much of the hard labor while driver-less and self- braking cars will make even the most trifling physical exertion of driving the car a thing of the past.

Here is where we are today.  The train we’re on is hurtling at break neck speed on the information railway.  It is not slowing down; it is speeding up, in fact, and getting off does not look like a good option.  Unfortunately, the only thing that can stop a runaway train is derailment – a most devastating scenario.  That scenario is the total failure of the energy infrastructure which, by the way, relies heavily on information. Let us not forget that sources of energy, be it oil, nuclear, hydro, wind power or solar, are all funneled into producing electricity.  That whole energy to electricity complex, the whole caboodle, runs on information that runs on electricity.  It is a vicious cycle.

Somewhere in parts of the world hostile to the western way of life are mal-intentioned folks who want nothing more than to break or interrupt that cycle. That’s one.  The threat of conflict between nations is another.  Not to be ignored are those not likely to be in anyone’s mind.  Some 93 million miles away is one object in the sky which goes through a temper tantrum every eleven years causing electro-magnetic disturbances that can disrupt that cycle with impunity if past history is to e examined. From galaxies far, far away, or even in the backyard of our own Milky Way, there are objects, thousands or even a million times more massive than the sun, their farewell gestures outshining an entire galaxy.

Those are not likely it either - at least not during our lifetime.  Has it happened in the past?  Yes.  Our solar system came out of a massive supernova explosion that also created all the heavy elements beyond and including iron a few billion years ago.  This will call for another musing so let’s leave it at that but suffice it to say, that’s a scenario too that could bring us back to the beginning, at zero information.

Meanwhile, we need to re-examine our place in the general scheme of things.  The New Testament verse I quoted earlier must be taken to heart.  Regardless of your faith or personal beliefs, our worries, our fears are all anthropocentric – translation: “the belief that considers human beings to be the most significant entity of the universe and interprets or regards the world in terms of human values and experiences”.

The weakest link in the information technology turmoil is human frailty.  While this technology was borne out of the human spirit, its inventiveness and its resolve to make our lives “better”, it is also the human character that is its weakness.  We use and misuse almost everything we’ve invented.  Until such time that we have perfected the human character, no amount of technology shall ever be safe from misuse or will we ever be free from worrying about anything and everything.