“An individual has a limited capacity to compute, a limit that I call 1 person byte” (Image: Nuria Hidalgo)
You’ve come up with a novel perspective on economies. What led you there?
I’d been exploring the evolution of economies, and what could be learned about a country from the mix of products that it creates. But then I thought to myself: what about Elvis Presley or Neil Armstrong? What about the products of culture? Then it struck me that I wasn’t really looking at the development of industries or culture but at something more fundamental. It didn’t matter if people were producing objects, music, messages… What people are producing is information.
How can objects be information?
Information takes multiple forms. Broadly speaking, it is the embodiment of physical order, and that is what our economy produces – bicycles and buildings are all forms of information. You probably couldn’t make your shoes, and you certainly couldn’t make your smartphone or an aeroplane, but you don’t have any problem accessing all of that embodied information. Why? Because the individuals in the economy are acting collectively as a computer to figure out how to produce all this stuff. The more powerful this economic computer is, the more capable and resilient your country is.
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If the economy is a computer, what hardware is it running on?
Social networks. These affect the functioning of economies by changing how that hardware is configured. You can think of cities like New York or London as CPUs.
So our social networks are distributing our personal computing power?
Yes. By working together, we’re able to create things that we would never be able to create alone, like jetliners, cities and subway systems. Of course, one of the things that pushed us to do all of those things in a social context is that a person’s capacity to compute is finite. A biological cell has a finite capacity to compute, and the universe transcended that by developing multicellularity. Similarly, an individual has a limited capacity to compute, a limit that I call 1 personbyte. To push beyond this, there are social networks.
“An individual has a limited capacity to compute, a limit that I call 1 personbyte”
Can you give an example of personbytes in action?
Sure. Let’s say you are trying to produce a ceramic cup. It is not that difficult, so will require about 0.2 personbytes of knowledge: you just need to know how to put the clay together, how to spin it, shape it, bake it… But let’s say you want to create a helicopter. That might require 100 personbytes of knowledge, so you need a network of 100 people at the very least to bring together the know-how required to make it.
Doesn’t tapping into the internet mean we can all transcend our 1 personbyte limit?
There are constraints that limit your personal computation power. Let’s say that you were able to read all of Wikipedia; it would take all your life. Could you remember much of it? Our finite capacities are determined by the size of our brains, the length of our lives and the rates at which we can absorb information.
So are we headed for information overload?
Obviously, there has been a large increase in the amount of information being produced in the past few decades. Information blasting out of the digital fire hose does overwhelm some people, but it provides big advantages to the people, networks and countries that are able to harness it.
OK, so sticking with the economy-as-computer analogy…
It’s not an analogy – it’s a reality. We’re producing physical order in the form of products, messages and cultural work. The universe tends towards increasing entropy, or disorder, but we’re reducing entropy locally by taking energy, mostly from oil and natural gas, and transforming it into physical order by doing collective computation.
How does thinking about economies as computers change our perspective?
At a large scale, when we think of economies as computers, what we understand is that the differences in income between countries are essentially differences in the computational capacities of their economies. Look at countries like Japan, the UK, the US. These are really powerful computers that can produce anything that they imagine. These products, or “crystals of imagination”, might be a new type of software or a revolutionary solar panel. In less sophisticated countries, making those things is very hard, because you don’t have the computational capacity – so, ultimately, you cannot generate high levels of income.
What about countries with less sophisticated economies that rely on exporting natural resources for their income?
Here’s an example. In 2012, Brazil exported products worth about $41 billion to China – mostly simple things like iron ore and soya beans – and imported products worth about $33 billion from China – largely electronics, chemicals and processed metals. So Brazil has a positive trade balance with China, but it also has a negative “imagination balance”, as I call it, because Brazil is sending mined atoms and is buying back the way in which those atoms are arranged, in the form of electronics and so on. China is a more successful, adaptable computer than Brazil and so, ultimately, has a better economic outlook.
How has your perspective on economics influenced your world view?
I’m an anti-nationalist of all nations – and you can quote me on that.
I will. What does it mean?
In the past 30 years or so, we have learned that you shouldn’t judge people because of things they don’t get to choose, like gender or skin colour. You don’t choose the colour of your passport either but, for some reason, it’s encouraged to discriminate on that basis. That’s going to change. The new generations are not as nationalistic or religious as the older ones; they are not so tribal. We’re going through a transition that is going to help us connect in ways we have not connected before.
What effect will that connectivity have?
Look to history. Modern human divisions are caused by nothing other than the limits of technology; people in England speak a different language from people in France because going between England and France, say, 400 years ago, was a big journey. Now, they’re not far apart at all. The world is so connected that mixing is increasing. Wait a few hundred years – nothing in the grand sweep of history – and the world is going to be very different. The balkanised institutions we have now will largely be gone.
So do you see hyperconnected future humans becoming some sort of cosmic computer?
Maybe not yet a cosmic computer, but hopefully a planetary one.
Leader “The human element is what’s missing from artificial intelligence“
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CĂ©sar Hidalgo runs the Macro Connections group . His new book is Why Information Grows: The evolution of order, from atoms to economies (Penguin)
This article appeared in print under the headline “The human race is a computer”
