Information has been Improved so much, we are no longer interested in Information that has not been Improved On

This has always been a problem, we have to take our raw experience and process it, to make it meaningful. Every living being does this, and animals do it rapidly. Is this a threat? If so, react in a way that has protected us in the past. In this way, animals eat, or get eaten.

In humans, the fight or flight response is triggered, in milliseconds. The safest response is flight, and we could easily outrun our predators.

This worked fine, until the 19th Century, when we started killing each other with unbelievable efficiency. We had always had wars, for every reason imaginable - but our latest technologies (the Railroad and the Machine Gun) greatly increased their destructive potential.

And gave us WWI, the Depression, and WWII - with the Holocaust.

One of the problems here, was defective information - nations had badly distorted views about what was happening in the world, and how they should react to it.

Television made this situation worse - anyone watching his TV is informationally overloaded, they cannot possibly process this much information, this fast. Their responses to this, have been varied - they may become addicted to it - and watch TV for long hours every day. Or they may do whatever the advertisers want them to do (such as vote for the candidate with the most convincing commercial).

And then came the Computer, with its awesome ability to manipulate information - in the form of data.

Stanford University has produced a video about Computational Journalism - that lasted too long, for me. But the basic idea is simple - the Computer's Artificial Intelligence can outsmart our own intelligence - if we are not aware of this.

Which most of us are not.