The crucial point about a post-industrial society is that knowledge and information become the strategic and transforming resources of the society, just as capital and labor have been the strategic and transforming resources of industrial society … [There is a] rising hierarchy with data at the bottom, information in the middle, and knowledge at the top… [and] some would add intelligence or wisdom above that.
Predictor: Harris, Blake
Prediction, in context:In a 1995 article for the journal Government Technology, Blake Harris takes a look at the future of the Internet. Harris writes:”The mind-boggling quantity of information which cyberspace puts at our fingertips is causing us to look upon information in a different light. For one thing, information itself is increasingly considered a resource with intrinsic value and even, as the European Common Market declared a number of years ago, ‘a national resource.’ Writing in the Harvard Business Review, Daniel Bell highlighted the essence of what the information revolution is all about. ‘The crucial point about a post-industrial society is that knowledge and information become the strategic and transforming resources of the society, just as capital and labor have been the strategic and transforming resources of industrial society,’ he said. We have become increasingly aware that there is, as David Ronfeldt of the RAND Corp. described it, a ‘rising hierarchy with data at the bottom, information in the middle, and knowledge at the top… [and] some would add intelligence or wisdom above that.'”
Date of prediction: January 1, 1995
Topic of prediction: Getting, Sharing Information
Subtopic: General
Name of publication: Government Technology
Title, headline, chapter name: Cyberspace 2020
Quote Type: Direct quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
www.govtech.net/publications/gt/1995/oct/cyberspa.phtml
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Anderson, Janna Quitney