The Information Laws

Abstract

Mankind progresses in proportion to its wisdom which has roots in practice, acquired skills, available data & information, concepts and knowledge. To be wise, humankind needs to be informed and knowledgeable, otherwise will not survive own failures. Progress in knowledge was painfully slow as long as the racial memory was transmitted only by oral tradition. With the invention of writing and books the process of knowledge discovery and dissemination has been accelerated. Today, computers and their networks speed up that process far beyond our imagination. In 2000’s the Information Wave significantly controls the Agricultural and Industrial Waves through millions of computers. IT supports decision-making based on knowledge-oriented systems such as “data mining” that, for example, discovers knowledge about customers, organizational dynamics, and so forth to achieve competitive advantage. Information and knowledge become the strategic resource as engineering science was in the Industrial Wave. However, the discovery of human cognition potential must be guided by knowledge s c i e n c e, which just emerges. One of signs of any science is its set of scientific data, universal rules, laws, and systems of rules and laws. Hence, this paper offers the first attempt to develop main laws of information that should increase our awareness about the Information Wave which is a new stage of civilization’s dynamics that is taking place at the beginning of the 3rd Millennium. The chapter also provides the framework for the analysis of the human capital from the information perspective. This set of considerations reflects a new emerging approach which I call macro-information ecology.