The Ascent of Information: Books, Bits, Genes, Machines, and Life's Unending Algorithm

In the history of information theory, and science in general, one of the most influential research papers of the twentieth century is Claude Shannon’s “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,”

clever illustration, a group game of twenty questions that he called “negative twenty questions.” In this variant of the usual play, the guesser asking yes/no questions believes the group being interrogated has a single item in mind that they’ve all agreed on in the guesser’s absence. In actuality, each person can start with whatever they want in m

Imagine for a moment that the rise of the dataome, and the transition to non-biological computation on Earth, is more like the very first burst of molecular oxygen that really persisted some two billion years ago.

Shannon’s insight was that we can, with care, make the encoding more robust, at the cost of some extra data.

In these past two hundred thousand years, humans have incubated a dataome. That dataome has, as evidenced across the pages of this book, become increasingly intertwined with our survival and our behavior as a species. By several measures, including the comparison of global NOPS and FLOPs capacities, and the rise of our metalworld’s resource demands

self-information (the surprise of the value of a variable within a system).

You can think about Shannon’s entropy as a way to measure the size of those instructions, and therefore a measure of the thermodynamic conditions they describe. Informational entropy and physical entropy are two inextricably linked sides to the same story.

we’re missing what’s right in front of us. Evolution has been tinkering with ways to better propagate information on Earth since the get-go four billion years in the past.

For the dataome humans generate the one thing that we have yet to see machines or artificial algorithms produce: original information, real innovation, and open-ended novelty. Ideas seemingly plucked from the ether.