Information can be Psychologically Dangerous

NO ONE ever tells you how dangerous this stuff can be: they just go on pumping it out, hour after hour, day after day. You're consuming it right now, without a clue about the possible consequences. The worst thing is, evolution has predisposed your brain to crave it as much as your body craves fat and sugar. And these days - as with fat and sugar - you can get it everywhere.

That's because we live in the information age - and the stuff that risks doing the damage is information itself. As certain scientists and philosophers see it, the discovery and dissemination of knowledge is far from being an unqualified boon. We might be in danger of knowing too much. "Information can potentially be extremely dangerous," says philosopher Nick Bostrom, director of the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford. "The effects arising from knowledge can be momentous."

Humans are uniquely at risk because we have always craved information. Anthropologist Robin Dunbar and his colleagues at the University of Oxford suggest that this trait has almost certainly been bred into us during our evolutionary history. Evidence for this idea comes from the observation that in birds and primates, brain size is correlated with the ability to reason, to develop new feeding strategies and to survive extinction. "Clearly, the capacity to discover novel facts about the environment has a very ancient basis," Dunbar says.

For humans, new information has in the past brought a clear evolutionary advantage. The invention of spiked clubs, triremes, longbows, gunpowder and all the other military technologies can be traced to the discovery of new information. Each one enabled its inventors to steal a march on the competition. The information embodied in the laws of thermodynamics led to the development of efficient steam engines and, in short order, all the prosperity and exploitation of the British empire.

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