Been noodling on a notion of circular information economy and information recycling/reconditioning/regeneration. Like a generalization of the idea of extracting value from data exhaust.
Anyone seen anything like this?
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World is awash in high-entropy information output by high-value-add processes that feed on low-entropy information. Processing costs are falling fast enough due to AI that we can imagine extracting more value.
Advertising and intelligence gathering already do this narrowly.
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There's no way to reverse entropy.
All you can try to do is get a LOT of high entropy data exhaust from a lot of people, and then do some kind of statistical crunch on it, to distil a smaller amount of higher-value lower-entropy statistical overview.
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Then it's not a "circular information economy ... recycling/reconditioning/regenerating" information.
It's just a dissipative economy pulling in new information from elsewhere.
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The term circular economy is only used in such a dissipative sense. Even an isolated space habitat has non-closed mass/energy boundaries.
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Right. In a sense "entropy" is a misleading metaphor here.
The point is, if people are generating genuinely new information either through science or art, it's not clear what's "recycling" about it. Except in the sense that all science & art draws on existing ideas.\1

