"Full of fascinating insights drawn from an impressive range of
disciplines, The Ascent of Information casts the familiar and the
foreign in a dramatic new light." --Brian Greene, author of The Elegant
Universe
Your information has a life of its own, and it**'**s using you to get
what it wants.
One of the most peculiar and possibly unique features of humans is the
vast amount of information we carry outside our biological selves. But
in our rush to build the infrastructure for the 20 quintillion bits we
create every day, we've failed to ask exactly why we're expending
ever-increasing amounts of energy, resources, and human effort to
maintain all this data.
Drawing on deep ideas and frontier thinking in evolutionary biology,
computer science, information theory, and astrobiology, Caleb Scharf
argues that information is, in a very real sense, alive. All the data we
create--all of our emails, tweets, selfies, A.I.-generated text and
funny cat videos--amounts to an aggregate lifeform. It has goals and
needs. It can control our behavior and influence our well-being. And
it's an organism that has evolved right alongside us.
This symbiotic relationship with information offers a startling new lens
for looking at the world. Data isn't just something we produce; it's the
reason we exist. This powerful idea has the potential to upend the way
we think about our technology, our role as humans, and the fundamental
nature of life.
The Ascent of Information offers a humbling vision of a universe built
of and for information. Scharf explores how our relationship with data
will affect our ongoing evolution as a species. Understanding this
relationship will be crucial to preventing our data from becoming more
of a burden than an asset, and to preserving the possibility of a human
future.
