Erich Schmidt, former CEO of Google, announced in a conference that between the beginning of time and 2003, humanity generated roughly five exabytes of data, whereas we now produce the same volume of bits every two days.

"The information explosion is so profoundly larger than anyone ever thought," said Schmidt. Five exabytes is more than 200,000 years of DVD-quality video.5

To be fair, not all that "information" is what you would call information in a colloquial conversation. Most of it is the product of automated processes and communications between computers, mobile phones, and other devices—nothing that a human brain can understand. But still.