The answer to whether or not robots have DNA appears to be that they have something that accomplishes most, if not all, of the same function in the world. But it’s differently implemented. Their core, heritable information does not need to be held in individuals, or even within a given species. That information is dispersible, although often locali

the dataome directly influences human behavior and drives our expenditure of time and energy.

Here, meaningful information is information that influences the processes of natural selection.

When I say that an organism “has information,” what I mean is that it encodes something about the external world in itself.

The phase transition proposed from non-alive to alive has to be more intricate and only truly visible when you investigate the hierarchy of information flow:

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

Just because we don’t fully understand something, that doesn’t mean it exists outside our known parameters.

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.

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