Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies

Personbytes are fundamental in the sense that the accumulation of a volume of knowledge and knowhow that is smaller than a personbyte is constrained only by individual limitations (including experience and social learning), whereas the accumulation of an amount of knowledge and knowhow that is larger than a personbyte is also constrained by collect

Uncommon configurations of atoms, like a Bugatti or a guitar, embody more information than more common configurations of the same atoms, even though technically (and Shannon is right about this) communicating an ordered configuration and communicating a disordered configuration require the same amount of bits if we ignore the correlations that are

“There are a number of jobs that are based, in large measure, on either intellectual capital or craft-based skills, both of which have been honed through years of education, training and experience. Many of these kinds of knowledge-intensive activities, such as cultural production, scientific research, design work, mathematical analysis, computer p

Highly interacting out-of-equilibrium systems, whether they are trees reacting to the change of seasons or chemical systems processing information about the inputs they receive, teach us that matter can compute. These systems tell us that computation precedes the origins of life just as much as information does. The chemical changes encoded by thes

Complex products are not just arrangements of atoms that perform functions; rather, they are ordered arrangements of atoms that originated as imagination.

Thanks to their ability to deposit information in their physical environment, ants can solve difficult problems of transportation, construction, ventilation, and routing. Humans have a similar capacity. Yet instead of leaving behind pheromones, we leave behind physical instantiations of imaginary objects, such as wrenches, screwdrivers, dishwashers

in a world where knowledge and knowhow are trapped in social networks and are difficult to copy, we should expect large differences in countries’ abilities to crystallize imagination, since differences in the knowledge and knowhow available in a given country should be reflected in the set of products that each country is able to produce.

crystals of imagination.

it is common for people to confuse the value of products with the value of the knowledge and knowhow needed to make them, or to confuse knowledge and knowhow with ideas.