The Equation for Money in a Post-Industrial Economy, by Eldon New
In about 1989 I ran across a gas pump with a credit card reader built into it. While I was using it I realized that the signal travelling from the pump to a centralized computer system was data, but the signl travelling back too the pump became credit, then money, then commodities as the pump was instructed to dispense gasoline.
It can be further generalized that for most flows of data from one machine to another, there is a corresponding flow in a reverse direction, but possibly along a different circuit, of money.
I came up with a list of relationships in increasing order of abstraction, going from the concrete basis of Newton's laws of motion, to entropy, to Shannon's information theory, to the equation for the flow of monry in a post-industrial economy.
(1) f=ma ; Force = mass x accelleration (Newton) (2) Energy = force X distance ; (Newton) (3) Entropy (is proportional to ) change in Energy ; (definition of entropy) (4) Information (is proportional to) Entropy ; (Shannon) (5) Money (value in a post-industrial economy) (is proportional to) change in information
I felt that some might find the last point to be too abstract. Recently I have found a similar idea in "Darwin Among the Machines, the Evolution of Global Intelligence", by George B. Dyson.
On page 170, Dyson says,
"What counts is not so much the data that flow in any given direction, but the money that flows the other way. In the coalescence of the software, banking and telecommunications industries, we are spawning the precursors of collective digital organisms that will roam the network like social insects, sending packets of digital currency back to their nests....Electronic money allows organizations to do things and immediately sense the results."
The implications of the recent advent of digital currency speeds up the feedback loops that have already existed in the econmy. Dyson relates this to Wiener's work:
"This was the original premise of purposive systems as expounded by Norbert Weiner and Julian Bigelow in 1943: intelligent behavior evolves as a consequence of the abillity to measure and keep account of the effects of a given signal through feedback loops that return a message signifying the magnitude of the result."
From "Darwin Among the Machines":
"Hobbes saw human society as a self organizing system, possesed of a life and intelligence of its own."
"Erasmus Darwin was a ringleader of the industrial revolution, helping to spark the evolution of machines as surely as some unknown Cambrian ancestor of ours ignited the diversification of metazoan life."
"In the 1760s, inspired by the Birmingham visits of Benjamin Franklin, and drawing on his friendships with ...Josia Wedgewood and James Watt, Darwin founded the Lunar Society of Birmingham,..."
"The group of self styled 'Lunaticks' formed a nucleus for the industrialization of Britian."
"..Erasmus's notebooks contain sketches for pumps, steam turbines, horizontal axis windmills, canal lifts, speaking machines, internal combustion engines, a compressed air powered ornithopter, a hydrogen- oxygen rocket motor, and even an automatic water closet....Darwin was obsessed with the vision of a steam powered 'fiery chariot".."
"The Mind's New Science", by Howard gardner discusses the fields of Artificial Intelligence, Neuroscience, Philosophy, Psychology, Linguistics, and Anthropology.
"'We may be at the start of a major intellectual adventure: somewhere comparable to the position in which physics stood toward the end of the Rennaisance, with lots of discoveries waiting to be made and the beginning of an inkling of an idea of how to go about making them. It turned out, in the case of the early development of modern physics that the advancement of the science involved developing new kinds of intellectual sophistication: new mathematics, a new ontology, and a new view of scientific method.' (Sloan Foundation 1976)" (2)
(1) "Darwin Among the Machines, the Evolution of Global Intelligence", by George B. Dyson, Perseus Books, 1997
(2) "The Mind's New Science, a History of the Cognitive Revolution", by Howard Gardner, 1985
The Web of Life..by Fritjof Capra
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