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

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

Both genomes and brains (and potentially dataomes) can be thought of as devices for gathering information that enables predictions about the future based on the recurring patterns seen in the past.

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.

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

we) also produce interpreted versions of reality that they place in a dataome. Every equation of physics, or every computer simulation of how planets, stars, and galaxies orbit and evolve, is a bizarre imprint of an interpretation of the universe by the universe, built into the universe by the rearrangement of its atoms into brains, books, and hard

Compressibility and Shannon’s entropy provide a baseline measure of the intrinsic information content of data. But the health of that data must also relate to how robust it is; how well encoded it is to withstand noise and corruption. And when an organism’s data contains mutual, survival related information about the organism and its environment, t

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

data need not be constantly engaged with.

One of the biggest challenges with the idea of information flow and control as a defining property of life (and a window into what could be new physics) is that it still tends to encompass entities or systems that we traditionally think of as inanimate. An example would be anything that a biological entity fabricates, because in that fabrication th