Kevin Kelly says the fastest growing entity today is information, growing at a rate of 66% a year in The Expansion of Ignorance.
Yet the paradox of science is that every answer breeds at least two new questions. More answers, more questions. Telescopes and microscopes expanded not only what we knew, but what we didn’t know. They allowed us to spy into our ignorance.
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Thus even though our knowledge is expanding exponentially, our questions are expanding exponentially faster. And as mathematicians will tell you, the widening gap between two exponential curves is itself an exponential curve. That gap between questions and answers is our ignorance, and it is growing exponentialy. In other words, science is a method that chiefly expands our ignorance rather than our knowledge.
We have no reason to expect this to reverse in the future. The more disruptive a technology and tool is, the more disruptive the questions it will breed. We can expect future technologies such as artificial intelligence, controlled fusion, and quantum computing (to name a few on the near horizon) to unleash a barrage of thousands of new huge questions – questions we could have never even thought to ask before. In fact, it’s a safe bet that we have not asked our biggest questions yet.
Or, to put it another way, we have not yet reached our maximum ignorance.