A comment on Information Propagation- Or how do you kill information?

If television has made people puppets and slow in intellectual work. Then radio recovered people and made them think.

To go along the timeline.

Reading and writing was called a Ph.D. education back in 500 A.D.

Then Gutenberg's Press came out and people were freed from a low supply of books.

Then radio came out, and people got access to very fast news in a very thoughtful fashion. There is a lot more neurons free to think when you are just listening, then there are when your eyes and ears are being inundated with stuff.

Then television came out and the speed of light communications started, which was so much information people got completely dominated. Those who knew how to manipulate camera angles and television to make themselves look better (Kennedy vs Nixon debate) acquired a lot of unconscious power in the minds of people.

After all this time, technology has more and more provided people with information. Until the television, of course, all this information had freed people from ignorance. With television however, we were getting into the realm where propaganda was just as easy to dissimilate as the real truth. Movies back in WWII were great propaganda tools, to be used for both evil and good. Visuals were very powerful. It has a visceral quality that books and radio never had. Although radio (Martian attacks) can have their own brand of suspension of disbelief.

So, what is the latest advention of human knowledge?

Why, the internet of course.

I predict Artificial Intelligences after the internet, will also revolutionize information and the way we take it in.

Because the internet allows us to get information faster than television, but it also lets us get not only MORE information than television but also more SPECIFIC information (google, blogs) than television. That made all the difference.

Because it was as if you knew how to read and write, but you never had enough books to do it with and it took forever to write down anything.

Then Gutenberg's press came along and that was solved and everyone could get cheap books to read.

This was the same dichotomy with the internet.

With television, you had speed and technology to bring such and such news to people. But you lacked the ability to fully use that information as a person watching the television, you just could not CONTROL what you wanted to know because the supply was so low and in demand and controlled by media companies, and not you.

The internet is home owned, it is like a book, it is something you personally own and have access to. Back in teh days without the Gutenberg Press, most people had to take the Church's word for what the bible meant, because they didn't know Latin. Then Gutenberg's Press allowed printed bibles in the vernacular language and that changed everything.

The internet information superhighway really is very similar.

with true AI, you could even collate and reduce the confusion in the amount of data even further.