Recently it has been possible to claim that 90% or more of all the extant information in the world has been generated over the preceding two years. Seagate (2017) put total information created worldwide at 0.1 zettabytes (ZB, 1021 ) in 2005, at 2 ZB in 2010, 16.1 ZB in 2016, and it expected that the annual increment will reach 163 ZB by 2025. A year later it raised its estimate of the global datasphere to 175 ZB by 2025—and expected that the total will keep on accelerating (Reinsel et al. 2018). But as soon as one considers the major components of this new data flood, those accelerating claims are hardly impressive. Highly centralized new data inflows include the incessant movement of electronic cash and investments among major banks and investment houses, as well as sweeping monitoring of telephone and internet communications by government agencies. At the same time, billions of mobile phone users participating in social media voluntarily surrender their privacy so data miners can, without asking anybody a single question, follow their messages and their web-clicking, analyzing the individual personal preferences and foibles they reveal, comparing them to those of their peers, and packaging them to be bought by advertisers in order to sell more unneeded junk—and to keep economic growth intact. And, of course, streams of data are produced incessantly simply by people carrying GPS-enabled mobile phones. Add to this the flood of inane images, including myriads of selfies and cat videos (even stills consume bytes rapidly: smartphone photos take up commonly 2–3 MB, that is 2–3 times more than the typescript of this book)—and the unprecedented growth of “information” appears more pitiable than admirable.

Forecasting the state of modern civilization for generations or centuries to come remains an impossible exercise. Even relatively near-term forecasts are bound to fail: no matter how assiduously assembled, a 2018 construct of the world as it might be in 2100 would be, almost certainly, even more misleading than the construct of the year 2018 made in 1936.

Smil, Vaclav. Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2019.

In the late 1960s I was transformed into a radical environmental activist. A rag-tag group of activists and I sailed a leaky old halibut boat across the North Pacific to block the last hydrogen bomb tests under President Nixon. In the process I co-founded Greenpeace. . . . Environmentalists were often able to produce arguments that sounded reasonable, while doing good deeds like saving whales and making the air and water cleaner. But now the chickens have come home to roost. The environmentalists’ campaign against biotechnology in general, and genetic engineering in particular, has clearly exposed their intellectual and moral bankruptcy. By adopting a zero tolerance policy toward a technology with so many potential benefits for humankind and the environment, they . . . have alienated themselves from scientists, intellectuals, and internationalists. It seems inevitable that the media and the public will, in time, see the insanity of their position.
—PATRICK MOORE

Kurzweil, Ray. The Singularity Is near: When Humans Transcend Biology. London: Duckworth, 2009.