Entropy of Information in the Digital Age and the Awaiting of “Superintelligence”

Marko Uršič
University of Ljubljana, Slovenia

This paper departs from the standard “statistical” notion of entropy as the measure of (dis)order in some system, and applies this notion to the contemporary world of digital information and communication, particularly to the internet and its impact on our thinking and living. The author states that the global informational entropy is rising, in spite of the fact that such devices as the giant Google searching machine or the worldwide Wikipedia have been constructed and released just to organize and share information to be available for all humankind. Some digital optimists expect a turn of the present entropic trends in the rise of “superintelligence”, namely in a technological “singularity” which is supposed to happen in the near future (say, in this century), and they preach about the coming new age of “transhumanism” etc. However, such scenarios do not foresee that the advent of a superhuman intelligence, even if it were technologically possible, would more likely yield an opposite result from the expected: still faster rise of overall informational dissipation and eventually a chaos and collapse. In the last decade, the “control problem” of the presumed future supercomputers is intensively discussed, joining by this topic computer scientists, philosophers, sociologists, also some physicists – various human minds who do mind what the future of our civilization would be like.