(Kevin Kelly)
vo: Zillionics
April 2008 (translator's note: The French used the long scale for naming large numbers: million, billion, billion, billiard, trillion, trillion, etc.. In contrast, American English uses the short scale : million, billion, trillion, etc.. so that one billion in French is trillion English. The word zillion , it means a huge number.)
Increase is change.
large quantities of something changing the nature of these few things. Or as Stalin said "Quantity has a quality of its own." The computer J. Storrs Hall, Beyond artificial intelligence, writes:
From a certain quantity of something, it is possible, and indeed, not unusual, as it has properties not at all expressed in small, isolated examples. The difference [may be] at least a factor of one trillion (10 ^ 12). There is no case in our experiment, where a difference of a factor of one billion do not cause a qualitative difference, as opposed to quantitative. A trillion is essentially the difference in weight between a mite too small for us the way and too trivial that they feel, and an elephant. It's the difference between fifty dollars and the economic product of a year by the human race as a whole. It's the difference between the thickness a business card and the distance to the moon.
I call this difference the zillions.
The machinery of replication, especially the digital duplication, quantities can amplify ordinary everyday things and propel them in order of abundance previously unknown. Populations from 10 may to numbers in the order of one billion, a trillion, and the zillion.
A personal library can expand from 10 pounds to about 30 million pounds fully digital in Google Library. A music collection can go up to 100 albums all the music world. A personal archive can range from a box of old letters to a petabyte of information over a lifetime. A company may need to manage hundreds of petabytes of information per year. Scientists can now generate gigabytes of data per second. The number of files that a government may need to monitor, protect and analyze can reach in the trillions. The
zillion is a new area, and our new home. The scale of so many moving parts require new tools, new mathematics, new change of mind.
For scale: one billion pieces of a penny next to a football field, the project Megapenny
When we reached the quantity of orders giga, peta and exa , strange new powers are emerging. We can do things at these scales that would have been impossible before. A zillion hyperlinks provide information and conduct we would wait forever hundred or a thousand links. A trillion neurons give intelligence a million will not. A zillion data points will give a depth of view that only one hundred miles would never give.
same time, the capabilities needed to manage the zillions are intimidating. In this area, probability and statistics reign supreme. Our human intuitions are not reliable.
I wrote earlier:
We learned mathematicians that systems that contain very, very large quantities of parts behave significantly differently than systems with less than a million parts. The zillions of abundance is the highest parts of the order of many millions. Economy networks promises zillions of parts, zillions of artifacts, zillions of records, zillions of robots, zillions of network nodes, zillions of zillions of connections and combinations. The area is a zillion more comfortable in biology - where there are zillions of genes and organisms long ago - that in our recent manufactured world. Living systems know how to handle the zillions. Our own methods for dealing with the fullness zillion imitate biology. (In New Rules for New Economy , 1998)
The social web extends in the world of zillions. Artificial intelligence, data mining and virtual realities, this requires mastery of the zillions. As we raise the number of things we create, especially those that collectively we create, we also get our media and our culture in the zillions. The number of choices we have in music, art, images, words - anything! - Is now reaching the level of the zillions.
How do we avoid being paralyzed or bullied by the zillion choices (see the paradox of choice)? Does the zillion is unlimited? It's a long tail so long, so broad, so deep that it becomes something else entirely. Increase
is change.
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