From Atoms to Bits
A process of dematerialization continues. An almost unidirectional convergence towards a single form of representation of the world through numbers, zero and one.
Few people realize the borderline between the real world and the one made up of 0 and 1, bit, or digital. Now the digital world is so much part of our days that it seems to us one thing with the real world, the one made up of atoms.
In the digital world everything is a number
Digital music today is among the most used and present in the world of bits. We can pick up a sound in the analog world thanks to the vibration of our eardrum caused in turn by variations in air pressure at a certain frequency. When the sound (and therefore the music in general) has to be saved on a digital medium, and therefore digitized, it undergoes a sampling and quantization process. In practice it is transformed into numbers. Numbers then stored in a certain format (mp3, wav, flac, etc.) on a digital medium.
In addition to music, images are also among the most present in the world of bits. The images represent a set of colors and shapes. In the purely analogical world, our eyes are able to distinguish the various colors thanks to what is called the visible spectrum, that is the part of the electromagnetic spectrum that allows us to perceive light. Based on how the wavelength of visible light changes, and therefore its frequency, the type of color perceived by the human eye also changes. In the digital world, an image is divided into many small squares, called pixels, inside which there are visible colors thanks to the emission of light from a screen. Each color is associated with a number, which in general represents a well-defined combination of the three primary colors: Red, Green and Blue. Clearly each format (png, jpeg, bitmap, etc.) has its own way of storing this information. The same can be said for videos, since digital video is the union of digital images (called frames), shown one after the other at a certain speed (frames per second), and digital music.
The digitization of images and audio has been achieved with a gradual process and scientific research. At the dawn of information technology, digitization was only about letters and numbers, it took almost half a century to get it to the levels we have today. For example, it was unthinkable that the entire terrestrial globe could be digitized with annexed cartographic and territorial information (see Google Maps and Google Earth). Computer science has evolved in an incredible way and at a speed that has never been seen in any other field of science.
Making a technical and detailed discussion of the difference between analog and digital and how the conversion between analog and digital takes place (and vice versa) is not the purpose of this article. Just know that all information in digital format is numbers. Numbers represented by sequences of zeros and ones based on a certain encoding defined by a standard (the file format). Whether it’s a photo, a piece of music, a video, a spreadsheet or much more, the basic principle does not change: everything is transformed from continuous to discrete, everything is translated and stored in numerical form, in turn interpreted by electronic circuits as voltage variations, or more simply sequences of current (the one) and not current (the zero).
The digital world, artificial intelligence and electronic computers
The digital world has now become almost a complete numerical discretization of the real world. From augmented and virtual reality viewers to our smartphones we delegate to our electronic computer (whether it is the home PC or smartphone) all the tasks, physical or even just intellectual. All this few decades ago was unthinkable to be done by an electronic computer. If the first software to replace man were those that replaced him in making mere mathematical calculations, today thanks also to Artificial Intelligence, and increasingly advanced software that integrate it, electronic computers are able to do things that were previously exclusively human. If the first software that replaced humans were useful, for example, to carry on accounting or to replace typewriters, today software is used, for example, to replace help desk employees (customer assistance) by making the customers with real chatbots that emulate a human being almost perfectly. Some chatbots do this so well that in the next years could pass the Turing Test without any problems.
Transmitting information into the digital world
In the analog world every analog information has its own network. Each type of information, voice calls, radio, television, has its own communication network with its reference terminal. In the last years, thanks to digital world, we had unifies all these networks into one. We can do calls and video calls, listen radio, television and communicate using the same net: Internet.
A tangible proof of how we are using this network unification is our smartphones. Before smartphones, we simply called them cell phones (or cell phones), the only thing we could do was call and text. Since they became smart (thanks Steve Jobs) and therefore had access to the Internet (the network of networks), from the same terminal, our smartphone, we can do a myriad of different things. Make phone calls, make video calls, surf the web, post photos, listen to audio, send emails and much more. All through the same device and all through various application services where the Internet is a prerequisite for their correct functioning. We could therefore say that today the digital world is connected thanks to the Internet. Everyone interacts thanks to the Internet which has now become a sort of universal communication channel.
The digital that returns to analog
The conversion process from analog to digital and vice versa is not one-way. For example, with the advent of 3D prints it seems that the world of bits returns to reality by reconverting itself into atoms and materializing.
The same thing happens when we print a photo or PDF with a classic printer or when we play music from a digital device. Therefore, it is clear, the transformation process in some cases is reversed and the world of bits is converted back into the material world of atoms.
Conclusions
Digitization will continue more and more in a continuous unstoppable process. The longer this continues, the harder it will be for people to understand the borderline. It will be increasingly difficult to perceive where the digital world ends and where that of atoms begins, with the risk of remaining imprisoned in the first and forgetting that we actually exist in the second. We are ourselves made of atoms and therefore the digital will remain, however increasingly indistinguishable, an emulation of reality.
