Podcast
Pivot
The author discussed his book, which explores how our relationship with data affects our evolution as a species; he explained that humans and data are in a symbiotic relationship, and that while there are aspects that are detrimental to humans, it persists because it expands and fills in new niches. He used Facebook as an example of something that emerged from this symbiosis.
So my book, The Ascent of Information is a big idea. It focuses on a very big and kind of strange and provocative idea, which is that if we look at us as a species, what is so interesting about us is...
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The author discussed his book, which explores how our relationship with data affects our evolution as a species; he explained that humans and data are in a symbiotic relationship, and that while there are aspects that are detrimental to humans, it persists because it expands and fills in new niches. He used Facebook as an example of something that emerged from this symbiosis.
So my book, The Ascent of Information is a big idea. It focuses on a very big and kind of strange and provocative idea, which is that if we look at us as a species, what is so interesting about us is that we generate and utilize and propagate all of this information that's not encoded in our DNA.
And so obviously in my book, I go to a lot of lengths to draw together the arguments to support that hypothesis. But what's interesting about that is that when you start to look at the world this way, that we coexist with this entity, this data-owned, and we're reliant on it just as it is reliant on us.
And it's pretty apparent that there are a lot of aspects to what goes on with Facebook that are kind of detrimental to humans. Right, fake information, endless pictures of your lunchtime sandwich or your cat or whatever, apologies if you have cats or dogs.
But from the point of view of the data-owned, it's fantastic because the data-owned does what everything does that's under the umbrella of Darwinian evolution. It persists into the future, it expands, it fills in new niches, it just takes over.
So the book is really an exploration of that basic idea and it digs deep into information theory and to evolutionary biology and just into the physics of information.