que hemos perdido con el conocimiento?
¿Dónde está el conocimiento
que se nos ha perdido con la información?
T. S. Eliot
Sólo se retiene aquella información
para la que existen marcos conceptuales previos
y aquellos en las que se está vitalmente implicado.
Jorge Peña Vial
Algo es el azar si su información
es de una complejidad irreductible.
Gregory Chaitin
Desde nuestro punto de vista
parece que cada vez sabemos más;
al mismo tiempo, parecer ser
que cada vez comprendemos menos
lo que nos está ocurriendo.
(...)
Otrosí:
en la línea de la Pobreza enseñada en los Evangelios...
Cuánto más tenemos, menos poseemos.
Meister Eckhart
La esencia de la civilización no consiste
en la multiplicación de los deseos,
sino en su renuncia deliberada y voluntaria.
Mahatma Gandhi
La producción de alimentos
es suficiente para saciar el hambre del mundo
pero no para saciar la avaricia de los hombres.
Mahatma Gandhi
No es posible maximizar simultáneamente
la energía, el tiempo y la información
El triángulo de Spreng
Spreng has a background that is noteworthy.
Trained as a physicist, he later worked as engineer
and developed an interest in economics.
His triangle is an attempt to connect
these areas, and as such is very interesting.
The example he starts with is purely thermodynamical.
A reversible process, without loss of energy,
would take an infinite amount of time.
Any faster, and the process becomes irreversible.
The faster it is, the more energy is needed
(at least in the examples Spreng discusses).
So there is a trade-off between time and energy
that carries over to manufacturing.
Information then comes in
as an improved technology
that makes the process more efficient,
and so, more information saves time or energy.
That is the basic idea.
Spreng's original paper is here,
Spreng's original paper is here,
but I couldn't get access to it,
so I settled for the 1993 remake
and the following is my summary.
I've redrawn it for your convenience, click to enlarge.
Spreng's triangle is a plane with 3 axes at 120° to each other.
The 3 axes are energy (E), time (T) and information (I) respectively.
I have drawn lines with constant time in blue,
constant information in red, and constant information in green.
In the lower right E=0 corner,
that Spreng refers to as the "starving philosopher,"
one needs no energy, but has an infinite amount of time
and all the information in the world.
In the lower left, I=0, corner,
that Spreng refers to as the "primitive man,"
one has no information and needs an infinite time
to get anything done with maximal energy.
In the upper corner, the "industrial man,"
one has plenty of information and energy
to get things done in zero time.
The corners are however unrealistic limits
that shouldn't be taken too seriously,
they're just to show the trends
if you move around in the diagram.
Now to define a point in a plane
Now to define a point in a plane
you only need two axes,
so the relevant statement here
would be that all possible points
of combinations E,T,I lie in a plane.
I say "would be" because I will argue
in the following that though
superficially plausible and appealing,
I don't think it is actually the case.
In his paper, Spreng discusses
In his paper, Spreng discusses
in which way energy, time, and information
partly substitute for each other
from several different aspects.
At some point, he claims for example
At some point, he claims for example
that in industrial countries
on a national level working hours
substitute for energy use,
citing himself in mentioned earlier paper
that I had no access to.
So I plotted the working time per year per worker from this table,
against the annual energy consumption per capita from this table
(in kilogrammes of oil equivalent per year).
I don't know about you, but I can't see any correlation or anti-correlation in that.
I don't know about you, but I can't see any correlation or anti-correlation in that.
Well, the data I used is from 2003, so, possibly 40 years ago that looked different,
but I can't say I am very convinced.
However, this turns out not to be of much importance later,
he just uses this because he wants to send a message
that civilization should slow down the hamster wheel (invest time)
to instead save energy:
One easily sees from Spreng's discussion,
"Whether the time saved is simply used to produce and consume more,
or whether some saved time is set aside as time for cultural development
is of prime importance."
One easily sees from Spreng's discussion,
that the "information" he is referring to is ill-defined.
To be fair however, it does become clear
that he is talking about manufacturing processes
and their improvement.
So Wikipedia isn't really a counterexample.
At some point he specifies information
to mean 'relevant' information,
yet one doesn't know relevant for what.
Maybe it's the information
needed to decrease energy or time,
but then the argument becomes circular.
I think the name "information" is very misleading.
What he seems to mean is something
like the complexity of a technological process.
Not that this is better defined.
However, just when I was about to throw the paper in the garbage,
However, just when I was about to throw the paper in the garbage,
Spreng goes and admits that the "relevant information"
is totally ill-defined and pulls the following trick
that helped me to make more sense out of his triangle.
He says, let's just consider information
as an unknown parameter
and assume it is measured by the market:
"[T]he market measures the information content of goods and services."
So, let Y be the market value of a good or service,
then he defines information (I) by the following equation
- Y = pL L+ pE E + I
where L is input to production of the good in working hours,
pL the price per hour, E is the energy input in some units,
and pE the price for that energy unit.
That would indeed define a surface if this equation
That would indeed define a surface if this equation
would be fulfilled, so the question is, does it work?
First, we note that this equation almost certainly
isn't fulfilled for goods with cultural value like, say, Marilyn Monroe's dress.
I don't see what difference it should make
for the right side of the equation whether Marilyn or I
wear a dress before auction, yet I have some doubts
anybody would pay me some million bucks for that,
so it does make a difference for the left side
of the equation which is no good.
So then let's look at goods without cultural value,
if such exist, maybe a banana will do.
Still, something seems to be really funny with this equation.
The alleged market value of the good
doesn't at all depend on supply
and demand for that good.
I mean, I don't know a lot about economics,
but if you're growing bananas in your backyard
with input E,I,L and suddenly all bananas in Brazil
fall victim to epidemic monkey obesity,
your backyard bananas would be in high demand
and up goes Y without any change to the right side of the equation.
This is not to say that it is not possible to make sense out of Spreng's triangle,
This is not to say that it is not possible to make sense out of Spreng's triangle,
but at least from what's in his 1993 paper it seems to me it would take more work
to integrate this idea with economics. Spreng concludes his paper with the words
You could then summarize my criticism as these are not the only two roads.
The importance of new information technology, NIT,
in respect of future energy use can hardly be overstated.
However, new information technology can do two things.
It can be used to substitute time by information
or to substitute energy by information.
new information technology can, in other words, both be used
to speed up the pace of life (work and leisure),
thus promoting a society of harried mass consumers,
or it can be used to conserve precious natural resources
(energy and non-energy) by doing things more intelligently
and improving the quality of life
without adding stress to the environment.
It is up to the society as a whole,
politics of course included, to decide
which of the two roads are taken.”
You could then summarize my criticism as these are not the only two roads.
Your new information technology can also cost you more energy and more time.
Like this damned Windows that never seems to finish updating
and keeps popping up a message that I have to restart.
Bottomline: Plausible ideas are the most dangerous ones.
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