We are awash in information. James Gleick called it a flood in his celebrated book, The Information, for a reason. The kilobytes turned into megabytes, gigabytes, tera, peta, and on up the Greek-Latin scale towards zetta and yotta. People's natural inclination has been to say, "Well, computers crunch data well, so let's use them to simplify things." That's where you get algorithmic filtering like Google and Microsoft's search engines or Facebook's News Feed.
But information overload has been with us since we had these old eyes of ours, which bring immense amounts of information into our brains every second of every day. In preparing for my interview with Will Wright, I was struck by his statement of human intelligence in Scientific American: