Hal Varian Quotations

It isn't that information is exploding, but accessibility is. There's just about as much information this year as there was last year; it's been growing at a steady rate. It's just that now it's so much more accessible because of information technology. The consensus is that a Web crawler could get to a terabyte of publicly accesible HTML. A terabyte is about a million books. the UC Berkeley library has about 8 million books, and the Library of Congress has 20 million books.

Brynjolfsson and McAfee take us on a whirlwind tour of innovators and innovations around the world. But this isn't just casual sightseeing. Along the way, they describe how these technological wonders came to be, why they are important, and where they are headed.

If a train stops at a train station, what do you think happens at a work station?

How unhappy are you that your dishwasher has replaced washing dishes by hand, your washing machine has displaced washing clothes by hand or your vacuum cleaner has replaced hand cleaning? My guess is this ‘job displacement’ has been very welcome, as will the ‘job displacement’ that will occur over the next 10 years. This is a good thing. Everyone wants more jobs and less work.

I keep saying that the sexy job in the next 10 years will be statisticians, and I'm not kidding.

We used to be calorie poor and now the problem is obesity. We used to be data poor, now the problem is data obesity.

It's a fun thing. Now one of the things we're thinking about is what to do with it.

It's possible it could be a victim of its own success. As more people chime in, you get a cacophony.

Imagine that the blackboard is an N-dimensional manifold.

I was a little surprised. I expected this to be accurate because there's a lot of literature and experience with these systems. But this has been even better than I expected.