Although this wave of popularity is certainly pleasant and exciting for those of us working in the field, it carries at the same time an element of danger.
While we feel that information theory is indeed a valuable tool in providing fundamental insights into the nature of communication problems and will continue to grow in importance, it is certainly no panacea for the communication engineer or, a fortiori, for anyone else.
Seldom do more than a few of nature’s secrets give way at one time. It will be all too easy for our somewhat artificial prosperity to collapse overnight when it is realized that the use of a few exciting words like information, entropy, redundancy, do not solve all our problems.
—CLAUDE E. SHANNON, “THE BANDWAGON,” IRE TRANSACTIONS ON INFORMATION THEORY, 1(2) (1956):3
Any fool can know. The point is to understand.
—ORIGIN UNKNOWN, OFTEN ATTRIBUTED TO ALBERT EINSTEIN
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