This new mode of being—surfing the waves, diving down, rushing up, flitting from bit to bit, tweeting and twittering, ceaselessly dipping into newness with ease, daydreaming, questioning each and every fact—is not a bug. It is a feature. It is a proper response to the ocean of data, news, and facts flooding us. We need to be fluid and agile, flowing from idea to idea, because that fluidity reflects the turbulent informational environment surrounding us. This mode is neither a lazy failure nor an indulgent luxury. It is a necessity in order to thrive. To steer a kayak on white-water rapids you need to be paddling at least as fast as the water runs, and to hope to navigate the exabytes of information, change, disruption coming at us, you need to be flowing as fast as the frontier is flowing.
But don’t confuse this flux for the shallows. Fluidity and interactivity also allow us to instantly divert more attention to works that are far more complex, bigger, and more complicated than ever before. Technologies that provided audiences with the ability to interact with stories and news—to time shift, play later, rewind, probe, link, save, clip, cut and paste—enabled long forms as well as short forms. Film directors started creating motion pictures that were not a series of sitcoms, but a massive sustained narrative that took years to tell. These vast epics, like Lost, Battlestar Galactica, The Sopranos, Downton Abbey, and The Wire, had multiple interweaving plotlines, multiple protagonists, and an incredible depth of characters, and these sophisticated works demanded sustained attention that was not only beyond previous TV and 90-minute movies, but would have shocked Dickens and other novelists of yore. Dickens would have marveled back then: “You mean the audience could follow all that, and then want more? Over how many years?” I would never have believed myself capable of enjoying such complicated stories, or caring about them enough to put in the time. My attention has grown. In a similar way the depth, complexity, and demands of video games can equal the demands of marathon movies or any great book. Just to become proficient in some games takes 50 hours.
But the most important way these new technologies are changing how we think is that they have become one thing. It may appear as if you are spending endless nanoseconds on a series of tweets, and infinite microseconds surfing between web pages, or hours wandering between YouTube channels, and then hovering only mere minutes on one book snippet after another, when you finally turn back to your spreadsheet at work or flick through the screen of your phone. But in reality you are spending 10 hours a day paying attention to one intangible thing. This one machine, this one huge platform, this gigantic masterpiece is disguised as a trillion loosely connected pieces. The unity is easy to miss. The well-paid directors of websites, the hordes of commenters online, and the movie moguls reluctantly letting us stream their movies—these folks don’t believe they are mere data points in a big global show, but they are. When we enter any of the 4 billion screens lit today, we are participating in one open-ended question. We are all trying to answer: What is it?
The computer manufacturer Cisco estimates that there will be 50 billion devices on the internet by 2020, in addition to tens of billions of screens. The electronics industry expects a billion wearable devices in five years, tracking our activities, feeding data into the stream. We can expect another 13 billion appliances, like the Nest thermostat, animating our smarthomes. There will be 3 billion devices built into connected cars. And 100 billion dumb RFID chips embedded into goods on the shelves of Walmart. This is the internet of things, the emerging dreamland of everything we manufacture that is the new platform for the improbable. It is built with data.
Knowledge, which is related, but not identical, to information, is exploding at the same rate as information, doubling every two years. The number of scientific articles published each year has been accelerating even faster than this for decades. Over the last century the annual number of patent applications worldwide has risen in an exponential curve.
We know vastly more about the universe than we did a century ago. This new knowledge about the physical laws of the universe has been put to practical use in such consumer goods as GPS and iPods, with a steady increase in our own lifespans. Telescopes, microscopes, fluoroscopes, oscilloscopes allowed us to see in new ways, and when we looked with new tools, we suddenly gained many new answers.
Yet the paradox of science is that every answer breeds at least two new questions. More tools, more answers, ever more questions. Telescopes, radioscopes, cyclotrons, atom smashers expanded not only what we knew, but birthed new riddles and expanded what we didn’t know. Previous discoveries helped us to recently realize that 96 percent of all matter and energy in our universe is outside of our vision. The universe is not made of the atoms and heat we discovered last century; instead it is primarily composed of two unknown entities we label “dark”: dark energy and dark matter. “Dark” is a euphemism for ignorance. We really have no idea what the bulk of the universe is made of. We find a similar proportion of ignorance if we probe deeply into the cell, or the brain. We don’t know nothin’ relative to what could be known. Our inventions allow us to spy into our ignorance. If knowledge is growing exponentially because of scientific tools, then we should be quickly running out of puzzles. But instead we keep discovering greater unknowns.
Thus, even though our knowledge is expanding exponentially, our questions are expanding exponentially faster. And as mathematicians will tell you, the widening gap between two exponential curves is itself an exponential curve. That gap between questions and answers is our ignorance, and it is growing exponentially. In other words, science is a method that chiefly expands our ignorance rather than our knowledge.
We have no reason to expect this to reverse in the future. The more disruptive a technology or tool is, the more disruptive the questions it will breed. We can expect future technologies such as artificial intelligence, genetic manipulation, and quantum computing (to name a few on the near horizon) to unleash a barrage of new huge questions—questions we could have never thought to ask before. In fact, it’s a safe bet that we have not asked our biggest questions yet.
• • •
Every year humans ask the internet 2 trillion questions, and every year the search engines give back 2 trillion answers. Most of those answers are pretty good. Many times the answers are amazing. And they are free! In the time before instant free internet search, the majority of the 2 trillion questions could not have been answered for any reasonable cost. Of course, while the answers may be free to users, they do cost the search companies like Google, Yahoo!, Bing, and Baidu something to create. In 2007, I calculated the cost to Google to answer one query to be approximately 0.3 cents, which has probably decreased a bit since then. By my calculations Google earns about 27 cents per search/answer from the ads placed around its answers, so it can easily afford to give its answers away for free.
We’ve always had questions. Thirty years ago the largest answering business was phone directory assistance. Before Google, there was 411. The universal “information” number 411 was dialed from phones about 6 billion times per year. The other search mechanism in the past was the yellow pages—the paper version. According to the Yellow Pages Association, 50 percent of American adults used the print yellow pages at least once a week, performing two lookups per week in the 1990s. Since the adult population in the 1990s was around 200 million, that’s 200 million searches per week, or 104 billion questions asked per year. Nothing to sneeze at. The other classic answer strategy was the library. U.S. libraries in the 1990s counted about 1 billion library visits per year. Out of those 1 billion, about 300 million were “reference transactions,” or questions.