A brief history of the information industry

Before considering the business and social impacts of the current data-driven AI revolution, it is worth considering how our use of information has evolved over the last 5,000 or so years. In many ways, the forces that led to the rise of information being transcribed for the first time are not too dissimilar to those driving change today. Commerce and the desire to maintain power over disparate groups of citizens have always required the creation, storage and distribution of information in multiple forms and across a variety of media.

One of the earliest forms of transcription was discovered in 1929 by Julius Jordan, a German archaeologist who excavated a collection of clay tablets over 5,000 years old in what is now Iraq. It took almost 50 years for researchers to decipher the markings on the tablets, which turned out to be records of the sale of commodities such as sheep, grain and honey. What many archae - ologists had thought were early forms of poetry or personal correspondence were, in fact, much more mundane, but vital to the orderly flow of goods across the region (Harford, 2017). Further study of the tablets revealed an unexpected sophistication in the way information was transcribed in the clay. As higher quantities of goods needed to be recorded, new ways of representing larger numbers were needed. For example, the sale of three sheep involved the sheep being pressed into the clay three times, but when quantities grew above ten, other symbols were required. These symbols allowed records of ever-larger exchanges to take place.