Martin Hilbert, Priscila López

Humankind’s capacity for unidirectional information diffusion through broadcasting channels has experienced comparatively modest annual growth (6%). Telecommunication has been dominated by digital technologies since 1990 (99.9% in digital format in 2007) and the majority of our technological memory has been in digital format since the early 2000s (94% digital in 2007).

Machines’ applicationspecific capacity to compute information per capita has roughly doubled every 14 months over the past decades in our sample, while the per capita capacity of the world’s generalpurpose computers has doubled every 18 months. The global telecommunication capacity per capita doubled every 34 months, while the world’s storage capacity per capita required roughly 40 months. Per capita broadcast information has doubled roughly every 12.3 years. Of course, such averages disguise the varying nature of technological innovation avenues.