Information Product

Economist measure the economic performance by measuring the products and services that an economy produces/delivers. Earlier goods (products) were enough to be measured to provide realistic view. Then services started becoming a major component. If information economy is the next big component then we should start measuring information that an economy generates. This would be leading indicator of economies that are going to grow. Earlier to judge whether an economy was rapidly growing one could look out of window to find trucks of construction material or other goods moving. But now, the economies where people sit in home and read and generate information are going to reap benefits years later.

While it will take time before data on individual economies would be available, this discussion attempts to collate available information. It also is useful to think of various measures of information and to dream of information systems that can handle all the information.

On earth there is huge amount of data being generated. Every year between 1 and 2 exabytes(10^18) of information is added:

http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/research/projects/how-much-info/summary.html

In 2003 we had 5 exabytes information :

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2003/1028amounofda.html

and if every 3 years the information doubles, soon we will have 10 exabytes.

And this is with world average of 14.6% internet usage: http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm

How big is that?

Recording real world objects and events in the world is an interesting study. It would show us are we nearing limits of information. Are we simply generating same information over and over again. Let us look at the number of atoms in universe, it is approximated to be 1e79:

http://www.sunspot.noao.edu/sunspot/pr/answerbook/universe.html#q70

If we store time-space data for these we would need 4e79 data items. Length of each data item would have to enable long distances and time since eternity. Well the information the world generates and handles is far below the information we would need to store to precisely say the position of each atom. Only then we could talk about processing systems capable of using laws of physics to predict the future of physical universe. And all this is without adding additional 7 dimensions given by string theory and the number and types of strings that would go in creating atoms.

Another interesting example is to look at human DNA. These are the codified programs that describe the human body, the code to create one.

One set of chromosomes have 3 billion base pairs : http://hypertextbook.com/facts/1998/StevenChen.shtml

Assuming 2bits for each, this amounts to 6 billion bits or 716 MB. And it is more exciting to know that this information is duplicated in 10^13 cells. If we store information about 7.2billion people in world, this means ~ 5 exa-bytes. Well just to record the information about every human, leave other flora-fauna, we need bigger systems. We perhaps can not think of the kind of redundancy that human body provides.

Till now we have only discussed about systems where real world is just represented. We will have to record all the events that are of interest to us like placing an order, shipping a good etc. We will then have to record all the creative work that humans have done in literature/science/technology etc. And once we record everything we would need systems that will process this to let us answer questions like what is the common sequence of DNA between all physicists?