It’s not your imagination: information really is bombarding us in greater and greater quantities. As Juan Enriquez explains, the actual statistics are even more outrageous than you’d think.

Question: Has globalization accelerated the pace of innovation?

Juan Enriquez: So, a few years ago, Hal Varian came up with a really interesting piece of work called "How Much Information," and he and his team started to quantify how much data humans are creating. And the conclusion is that over the next four years, or less, we are going to at least double the amount of data generated by the human species across time. I repeat that again. Over the next four years, we are likely to double the amount of data generated by a human species across time.

That sounds absolutely ludicrous because when you think of all the words and all the songs and all the books and everything else. Yes, but then come back to your own life. In the measure you start to think, how many photographs did you take when you were using Kodak film? And how many photographs you are taking now that you can use your little cell phone and use your digital camera and just download it onto your computer, which by the way, you’ve got to double the memory because you’ve got so many pictures on there?

And then what happens when the data density comes to film? And what happens with the new Flip Cameras where you can have high definition television come out of a $200 device that everybody’s gong to be wandering around with, and then you start thinking what’s happening in medical imaging, and then you start thinking about what’s happening in astronomical imaging, and then you think of the number of books that were published across time versus the number of blogs that are published today. And you begin to get a sense of how something that sounds wild and outrageous is actually something that all of us are living every day.

Recorded on November 9, 2009
Interviewed by Austin Allen