The World’s Technological Capacity to Store, Communicate, and Compute Information

@article{Hilbert2011TheWT,
  title={The World’s Technological Capacity to Store, Communicate, and Compute Information},
  author={Martin Hilbert and Priscila L{\'o}pez},
  journal={Science},
  year={2011},
  volume={332},
  pages={60 - 65}
}
An inventory of the world’s technological capacity from 1986 to 2007 reveals the evolution from analog to digital technologies. We estimated the world’s technological capacity to store, communicate, and compute information, tracking 60 analog and digital technologies during the period from 1986 to 2007. In 2007, humankind was able to store 2.9 × 1020 optimally compressed bytes, communicate almost 2 × 1021 bytes, and carry out 6.4 × 1018 instructions per second on general-purpose computers… Expand
View on AAAS
diyhpl.us
1,329 Citations
Highly Influential Citations
73
Background Citations
499
Methods Citations
56
Results Citations
10

Topics from this paper

      1,329 Citations

      Citation Type

      Citation Type

      Mapping the Dimensions and Characteristics of the World’s Technological Communication Capacity During the Period of Digitization (1986-2007/2010)
      This article analyzes the nature and characteristics of the world’s technological capacity to communicate information in bits per second during the two decades that were characterized by the… Expand
      Info Capacity| How to Measure the World’s Technological Capacity to Communicate, Store and Compute Information? Part I: Results and Scope
      TLDR
      The article shows how the particular question on the researcher’s mind, as well as the availability of source data has and will influence most of the methodological choices in different exercises. Expand
      C Communication Quantity
      An increasing share of the world’s data capacity is centralized in “the cloud.” The gatekeeper to obtain access to this centralized capacity is telecommunication access. Telecommunication channels… Expand
      Technological information inequality as an incessantly moving target: The redistribution of information and communication capacities between 1986 and 2010
      • M. Hilbert
      • Computer Science
      • J. Assoc. Inf. Sci. Technol.
      • 2014
      This article provides first‐time empirical evidence that the digital age has first increased and then (only very recently) decreased global, international, and national inequalities of information… Expand
      Strengthening Role of Information and Communication Technology in Global Society
      Humans have been storing, retrieving, manipulating, and communicating information since the Sumerians in Mesopotamia developed writing in about 3000 BC, but the term information technology in its… Expand
      Info Capacity| How to Measure the World’s Technological Capacity to Communicate, Store and Compute Information? Part II: Measurement Unit and Conclusions
      TLDR
      This article proposes an information theoretic measure that approximates the entropy of the source (which it is called “optimally compressed bits”) and explains the interpretation, creation, usage, benefits, and limitations of this unit of measurement. Expand
      How much of the global information and communication explosion is driven by more, and how much by better technology?
      • M. Hilbert
      • Computer Science
      • J. Assoc. Inf. Sci. Technol.
      • 2014
      TLDR
      This work quantifies how much of the technologically‐mediated information and communication explosion during the period of digitization (1986–2007) was driven by the deployment of additional technological devices, and how much by technological progress in hardware and software. Expand
      What Is the Content of the World's Technologically Mediated Information and Communication Capacity: How Much Text, Image, Audio, and Video?
      TLDR
      It turns out that the transfer from analog to digital has not led to toward increasing shares of media-rich audio and video content, despite vastly increased bandwidth, and both tendencies are good news for big-data analysts who extract intelligence from easily analyzable text and image data. Expand
      Information, Attention, and Decision Making
      More than five decades after the seminal works on how individuals process information and make decisions within organizations were published (Cyert & March, 1963; Simon, 1957), the thesis that… Expand
      Taking the Measure of National Bandwidths: Evolving Patterns of the International Digital Divide for 1986-2013
      • M. Hilbert
      • Business, Computer Science
      • 2016 49th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS)
      • 2016
      TLDR
      Novel findings reveal that only 3 countries host 50 % of the globally installed bandwidth potential (10 countries 75 %), that the digital divide between high-and low income countries in terms of kbps per capita has increased between 2001 and 2008, only decreasing below historic levels very recently during 2012-2013. Expand
      ...
      1
      2
      3
      4
      5
      ...

      References

      SHOWING 1-10 OF 332 REFERENCES
      Modern Digital and Analog Communication Systems
      TLDR
      Modern Digital and Analog Communication Systems offers students a superb pedagogical style and every effort is made to give an intuitive insight - rather than just proofs - as well as heuristic explanations of theoretical results wherever possible. Expand
      The Coming of Post-Industrial Society — A Venture in Social Forecasting
      In 1976, Daniel Bell's historical work predicted a vastly different society developing--one that will rely on the "economics of information" rather than the "economics of goods." Bell argued that the… Expand
      Internet measurements and data study over the regional
      We present the most significant results studying the Internet network traffic measurements obtained in Ciez@net. Ciez@net is a citizen subnet located in the village of Cieza that belongs to the… Expand
      End of Millennium: The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture
      From the Publisher: The final volume in Manuel Castells' trilogy is devoted to processes of global social change induced by interaction between networks and identity. He studies empirically the… Expand
      Technological guideposts and innovation avenues
      Abstract This paper presents an integrative view of innovation processes based on a theory of systems developed by the author over the past few years. In its essence, one of the most important clues… Expand
      Workload characterization for an E-commerce web site
      TLDR
      The use of SSL with respect to the various objects suggests that further study is needed to determine for which pages it is appropriate to use these security measures as they have both performance and security implications. Expand
      Information Technology and the World Economy
      This paper addresses the impact of investment in information technology (IT) on the recent resurgence of world economic growth. We describe the growth of the world economy, seven regions and 14 major… Expand
      Web Workload Characterization: Ten Years Later
      TLDR
      This work revisits the 1996 work by Arlitt and Williamson, repeating many of the same analyses on new data sets collected in 2004, and concludes that there are no dramatic changes in Web server workload characteristics in the last 10 years. Expand
      Introduction To Telecommunications Network Engineering
      Introduction to Telecommunications - What Is Telecommunications? Significance of Telecommunications. Historical Perspective. Standardization. Standards Organizations. Development of Telecommunication… Expand
      A Measurement Study of Internet File Transfer Traffic ; CU-CS-571-92
      TLDR
      Measurements of the Internet File Transfer Protocol are presented, gathered at the main gateway to the University of Colorado network, and it is found that nearly 40% of all transfers were duplicate transmissions, accounting for over 54% of the file transmission traffic. Expand
      ...
      1
      2
      3
      4
      5
      ...