Maybe it’s a useless distinction but it feels like we’ve gone through overlapping ages of Communication, Data, Processing, and Information. First we conquered

Maybe it’s a useless distinction but it feels like we’ve gone through overlapping ages of Communication, Data, Processing, and Information. First we conquered the ability to move matter and transmit signal, greatly shrinking the world. Next was sensor technology, especially the mobilization of it, and our ability to collect more data than we could ever imagine being able to process. Then we started going crazy with data centres and big data and the idea that maybe we can somehow correlate it all if we just process it enough. And now we’re finally turning data into information, building enormous graphs of correlation without even having to manually reason about a lot of it. Before AI, the hard part was figuring out how to go about finding the signal you needed. Now it’s getting easier at an incredible speed.