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Information Is Cheap, Meaning Is Expensive

A wonderful interview with George Dyson who grew up around the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, built kayaks in Canada and began to think about the internet before personal computers were a household staple. He talked with Martin Eiermann about the definition of life, human progress and the importance of cognitive autarchy. Quotes from the article in The European:

"it is always easier to find answers than to ask the right questions"

Finding answers is easy. The hard part is creating the map that matches specific answers to the right question. That's what Google did: They used the power of computing - which is cheap and really does not have any limits - to crawl the entire internet and collected and index all the answers. And then,by letting human beings spend their precious time asking the right questions, they created a map between the two. That is a clever way of approaching a problem that would otherwise be incomprehensibly difficult.

"The challenge is not to gather information, but to make sense of the information we have?"

Right. We now live in a world where information is potentially unlimited. Information is cheap, but meaning is expensive. Where is the meaning? Only human beings can tell you where it is. We're extracting meaning from our minds and our own lives.

"It is hard to see how computers could emerge as creative and imaginative entities in the near future."

We have to wait and see. But I am not sure whether computers are just tools. When you look at your iPhone to get directions, are you asking the phone where to go or is the phone telling you where to go? You cannot draw a strict line between active and passive information exchange. If some alien form of life came to earth, they might be convinced that there is a bodiless form of intelligence that is telling its constituent parts to turn left or right. So there is a symbiosis that works both ways.

"Information Is Cheap, Meaning Is Expensive" by George Dyson

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