Good catch, Argos!
I think
Chris Anderson (author of the
Wired article) has it dead wrong, but I'll have to come back later to try to explain.
For now, I'll just point out that by common consent the World's Greatest Theory Ever is
information theory, which in a sense identifies "information" with
statistical correlation, while manifestly ignoring causality. It's odd that Anderson didn't develop his theme to support his argument by invoking the genius of Shannon.
Nonetheless, I think the conclusion he suggests, that
science don't need no stinking models, is dead wrong. I haven't seen the talk by Peter Norvig of Google (does anyone have a link?) but if he really said the same thing, I can only say that he doesn't understand the significance of petabyte "cloud computing", which would be very odd given his position.
See
Entropy on the World Wide Web for some background, including (IIRC) an archived post by myself on the "acausality" inherent in Shannon's information theory. Note also that there are other information theories.