The Ascent of Information

Books, Bits, Genes, Machines, and Life's Unending Algorithm

By: Caleb Scharf

Narrated by: Jonathan Todd Ross

“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.

Critic reviews

Praise for The Ascent of Information

“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

“An astute, provocative contribution to information science and futurology.” —Kirkus

“Scharf provides a fascinating history of information theory.” —Booklist

“A fascinating study of information and its types.” —Library Journal, STARRED review

“A transformative new way of looking at our increasingly data-driven existence.” —Lee Billings, Scientific American

“Information is a way for one part of the universe to know something about another. What could be more profound than that? In this engaging and wide-ranging book, Caleb Scharf shows how information brings the world to life, both figuratively and literally.” —Sean Carroll, author of Something Deeply Hidden: Quantum Worlds and the Emergence of Spacetime

“I really enjoyed The Ascent of Information. The book is packed with provocative ideas, backed by wonderfully marshalled data, and entertaining on every page. Fascinating glimpses of what may turn out to be a new way to look at life.” —Jonathan Weiner, author of The Beak of the Finch

Great Brain Bias

Written with well-positioned anthropocentric blinders on, causing excellent science reporting to devolve into arrogant humanistic wishful thinking for the future.

Swashbuckling writer, data is mind !

Simple science, plain writing new science explained.

A fusillade of really great history and science using cloud graph, entropy dynamics giving a sweet flowing view and read.

These swashbucklers are a new top shelf presence.

Here data as mind is presented much like Language is Mind, in The Language Game, Morten H. Christiansen, Nick Chater

What did I just read?

This book is moderately entertaining at points, though, frankly, paper thin with the material that really matters. One issue for me was how the author would sprinkle in progressive political elements in strange ways that seemed forced and didn’t advance the narrative. For example, while discussing some of the information science historical advancements made by Bell Labs, the author made a quick sidebar away from the historical review to mention that almost all Bell Labs’ scientists were white back in those days. Like…why? Why bring race into a discussion on historical developments in information science. There’s stuff like that throughout the book. It’s very distracting, and moves the focus away from the core focus of the book.

shockingly sloppy and inaccurate

this is sadly one of those books where the topic is wonderful and yet the coverage of the material is so extremely paper thin and purely entertainment-oriented that it is hard to believe anything that said in the book. oversimplifications about the scientific method, about areas of sciences, about definitions which are really important to this topic, are profound. if you're looking for fake entertainment maybe this book is for you, if you care about reality try looking somewhere else. please be very careful before giving this book to children, starting kids off with something incorrect and easy to understand is not, I repeat not, a good foundation for education.