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The Ascent of Information
- Books, Bits, Genes, Machines, and Life's Unending Algorithm
- Narrated by: Jonathan Todd Ross
- Length: 11 hrs and 9 mins
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Publisher's Summary
“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, AI-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.
Critic Reviews
“Caleb Scharf provides a wonderfully accessible and compelling account of how our relationship to information is becoming increasingly central to how we live. 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)
“Masterfully weaving together anecdotes and thought experiments from neuroscience, evolutionary biology, theoretical physics, astrobiology, and information theory, Scharf investigates how our relationship with the dataome has fundamentally altered our lives and how it will continue to do so.” (Science)
“Scharf...offers a bold new perspective on the relationship between humans and information in this spirited consideration of data as a motivating force in humans’ lives.... Scharf’s provocative thesis is sure to shake things up for readers with an interest in humans’ relationship to data.” (Publishers Weekly)