The future of the global information revolution

Last week a woman entered the luxury clothing store 'Axela' in Tel Aviv. She joked with the saleswoman, acted like she was at home and in less than fifteen minutes managed to slip nine items of clothing into the bag and leave the place elegantly

Last week a woman entered the luxury clothing store 'Axela' in Tel Aviv. She joked with the saleswoman, acted like she was at home and in less than fifteen minutes managed to slip nine items of clothing into the bag and leave the place elegantly. Designer stores in Tel Aviv, to remind you, are often more expensive than the diamond exchange, calculated by a shekel per gram. The damage to the store owners, therefore, is estimated at thousands of shekels.

Fifty years ago, owners had to bite their lips, grind their teeth and absorb the damage.

Twenty years ago, the owners would have brought her security camera photo to the police, hoping it was of high enough quality and that the suspect was known enough to the police to lead to her arrest.

Today they uploaded the video to Facebook.

And that, friends, is an act that testifies to the spirit of the new era. And it's also genius, because the video will spread on the net at lightning speed. We all love to see a sophisticated and completely genuine robber in action. We all wonder if we know this girl. The video will become the next Israeli hit on the Internet and may even overtake hits like 'Another science - the film', as hard as it is to believe.

In recent years we have entered a new era, the era of instant and ubiquitous communication. A generation where everyone knows everything about everyone. If someone stole, robbed or murdered, and there happened to be a person around with a cell phone who could record or take pictures of the event, everyone knew about it ten minutes later. And if the quality of the photography improves (and there is no reason to think it will stop improving), in less than a day the information about the identity of the criminal will also flow to the blogs. This is the era of celebrities, and each of us is going to be a celebrity in our own right.

What are the expected consequences of this kind of invasion of privacy? The science fiction writer Isaac Asimov wrote in one of his short stories about a theoretical machine that would allow all humans to watch what everyone else is doing at any given time and moment. At the end of the story, the machine was destroyed by the government, fearing that humans are unable to deal with such omnipotent knowledge. And this is because such a machine, which we are about to create today on the Internet, makes sure that all the little white lies will disappear.

You can know exactly what and why your neighbor was shouting loudly in the early morning hours (the sugar, the sugar). You can find out that your bank clerk had a criminal conviction for having a knife in the car while you're waiting in line at the bank (and in the state of Israel where 90% of criminal prosecutions end in conviction, a person's chances of being acquitted are slim). Can we still trust the people around us, when everyone's little black secrets are exposed for all to see with a quick iPhone search?

The optimists will say, "But if you don't know the name of the person you meet on the street, you can't look him up on the Internet!" And that's true, for now. But already today there are algorithms that search the web based on photos, and we are not far from a future where we can take a picture of so-and-so-anonymous on the street, send the photo to a web search and find all the people who look like him in the world in particular and on Facebook in general. anonymous? It is not at all certain that this word will exist in the future.

Well, these are the bad sides of technology. It is equally important to pay attention to the more positive aspects, which I assume the video above will reveal soon. In an era of instant communication, results can be reached in a shockingly short time, especially when hundreds of thousands of surfers are analyzing and processing the information at the same time. This means that within a few hours from the moment the video is published, tens of thousands of surfers will have already passed it. I would not be surprised if information about the robber arrives in the coming days.

This speed was only possible due to the communication revolution that took place in the last twenty years and is now approaching its peak with the wireless internet and smart phones. The other revolution that follows immediately after it is the revolution of information and (lack of) privacy.

It is difficult to say how the information revolution will change the way of thinking of the human race. On the one hand, the revolution will bring us within a few years to an era where we can use smart phones, glasses and lenses with a digital display, to get the information about everything we see on the street. I will be able to know the price of every house on the boulevard, where I should buy the Beasley package cheaply in the kiosk, and how many previous owners the lady with whom I might go on a date tomorrow (and she will probably also know about my current wife). The availability of ongoing and non-stop information may lead to smarter, more considered, more informed decision-making.

Until someone realizes that it doesn't really work that way.

Because I am now going to raise another guess: in a short time the applications and algorithms will begin to appear that will limit and reduce the amount of unnecessary information that the person receives from the environment. Let them decide for him, in certain cases, what he really needs to see to protect his health and property, and what is not important enough to disturb his rest. We see this happening already today in Google and Wikipedia. Who among us surfs beyond the first page he searches on Google? How many of us look for an idea on the net just in anticipation of seeing what Wiki has to say about it - and don't even bother to read the dozens of other analyzes on the net?

The main winners in the future communication market will be those who knew how to allow their users the potential to receive knowledge from all over the world, side by side with the reduction of the received information to the most relevant items. Wikipedia does this very well, by grouping all the reliable information on one page. Google also discovers the relevant information with praiseworthy efficiency, through sophisticated search and information processing algorithms that give each site and each page its own relevance and reliability ranking. Without Google, we would be drowning in an excess of information of no real importance.

Who will be the next competitors to Google and their successful information distribution and restriction strategy?

We will find out the answer only in the next roll.