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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.
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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)
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Until the End of Time is Brian Greene's breathtaking new exploration of the cosmos and our quest to find meaning in the face of this vast expanse. Greene takes us on a journey from the big bang to the end of time, exploring how lasting structures formed, how life and mind emerged, and how we grapple with our existence through narrative, myth, religion, creative expression, science, the quest for truth, and a deep longing for the eternal.
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Uneven
- By NJ on 03-03-20
By: Brian Greene
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Arrival of the Fittest
- Solving Evolution's Greatest Puzzle
- By: Andreas Wagner
- Narrated by: Sean Pratt
- Length: 8 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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In Arrival of the Fittest, renowned evolutionary biologist Andreas Wagner draws on over 15 years of research to present the missing piece in Darwin's theory. Using experimental and computational technologies that were heretofore unimagined, he has found that adaptations are not just driven by chance, but by a set of laws that allow nature to discover new molecules and mechanisms in a fraction of the time that random variation would take.
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Robustness makes for an interesting life and book
- By Gary on 11-29-14
By: Andreas Wagner
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What Is Life?
- How Chemistry Becomes Biology
- By: Addy Pross
- Narrated by: Derek Perkins
- Length: 6 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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Seventy years ago, Erwin Schrdinger posed a simple, yet profound, question: What is life?. How could the very existence of such extraordinary chemical systems be understood? This problem has puzzled biologists and physical scientists both before, and ever since. Living things are hugely complex and have unique properties, such as self-maintenance and apparently purposeful behaviour which we do not see in inert matter. So how does chemistry give rise to biology?
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Profound & Life Changing...
- By Daegan Smith on 04-06-15
By: Addy Pross
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Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking
- By: Daniel C. Dennett
- Narrated by: Jeff Crawford
- Length: 13 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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Over a storied career, Daniel C. Dennett has engaged questions about science and the workings of the mind. His answers have combined rigorous argument with strong empirical grounding. And a lot of fun. Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking offers seventy-seven of Dennett’s most successful “imagination-extenders and focus-holders” meant to guide you through some of life’s most treacherous subject matter: evolution, meaning, mind, and free will.
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Loved it, but some philosophy background needed.
- By LongerILiveLessIKnow on 11-14-13
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Life’s Ratchet
- How Molecular Machines Extract Order from Chaos
- By: Peter M. Hoffman
- Narrated by: Paul Hodgson
- Length: 9 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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The cells in our bodies consist of molecules, made up of the same carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen atoms found in air and rocks. But molecules, such as water and sugar, are not alive. So how do our cells - assemblies of otherwise "dead" molecules - come to life, and together constitute a living being? In Life’s Ratchet, physicist Peter M. Hoffmann locates the answer to this age-old question at the nanoscale.
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For biologists to learn single molecule biophysics
- By A Synthetic Biologist on 09-04-14
By: Peter M. Hoffman
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On the Future
- Prospects for Humanity
- By: Martin Rees
- Narrated by: Martin Rees, Samuel West
- Length: 5 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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Humanity has reached a critical moment. Our world is unsettled and rapidly changing, and we face existential risks over the next century. Various outcomes - good and bad - are possible. Yet our approach to the future is characterized by short-term thinking, polarizing debates, alarmist rhetoric, and pessimism. In this short, exhilarating book, renowned scientist and best-selling author Martin Rees argues that humanity’s prospects depend on our taking a very different approach to planning for tomorrow.
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Science, the future, and great wisdom
- By Philomath on 10-29-18
By: Martin Rees
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Radical Abundance
- How a Revolution in Nanotechnology Will Change Civilization
- By: K. Eric Drexler
- Narrated by: Tim Pabon
- Length: 11 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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K. Eric Drexler is the founding father of nanotechnology - the science of engineering on a molecular level. In Radical Abundance, he shows how rapid scientific progress is about to change our world. Thanks to atomically precise manufacturing, we will soon have the power to produce radically more of what people want, and at a lower cost. The result will shake the very foundations of our economy and environment.
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Drexler Rehashes the Past
- By David on 10-19-13
By: K. Eric Drexler
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Undeniable
- How Biology Confirms Our Intuition That Life Is Designed
- By: Douglas Axe
- Narrated by: Neil Hellegers
- Length: 7 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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Throughout his distinguished and unconventional career, engineer-turned-molecular-biologist Douglas Axe has been asking the questions that much of the scientific community would rather silence. Now, he presents his conclusions in this brave and pioneering book. Axe argues that the key to understanding our origin is the "design intuition" - the innate belief held by all humans that tasks we would need knowledge to accomplish can be accomplished only by someone who has that knowledge.
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Seductively Challenge what are consider facts
- By Rafael Vila on 10-08-16
By: Douglas Axe
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Why Information Grows
- The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies
- By: César Hidalgo
- Narrated by: Stephen Hoye
- Length: 5 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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What is economic growth? And why, historically, has it occurred in only a few places? Previous efforts to answer these questions have focused on institutions, geography, finances, and psychology. But according to MIT's anti-disciplinarian César Hidalgo, understanding the nature of economic growth demands transcending the social sciences and including the natural sciences of information, networks, and complexity. To understand the growth of economies, Hidalgo argues, we first need to understand the growth of order.
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Great book!
- By bpjammin on 01-07-17
By: César Hidalgo
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Beyond Biocentrism
- Rethinking Time, Space, Consciousness, and the Illusion of Death
- By: Robert Lanza, Bob Berman
- Narrated by: Peter Ganim
- Length: 7 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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In Beyond Biocentrism, acclaimed biologist Robert Lanza and astronomer Bob Berman take the listener on an intellectual thrill ride as they reexamine everything we thought we knew about life, death, the universe, and the nature of reality itself. The first step is acknowledging that our existing model of reality is looking increasingly creaky in the face of recent scientific discoveries.
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Here's the thing
- By Mikal on 11-09-18
By: Robert Lanza, and others
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The Equations of Life
- How Physics Shapes Evolution
- By: Charles S. Cockell
- Narrated by: Ian Porter
- Length: 11 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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In The Equations of Life, biologist Charles S. Cockell makes the forceful argument that the laws of physics narrowly constrain how life can evolve, making evolution's outcomes predictable. If we were to find something very much like a lady bug eating something very much like an aphid on a distant planet, we shouldn't be surprised. The forms of life are guided by a limited set of rules, and, as a result, there is a narrow set of solutions to the challenges of existence.
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Too many equations, not enough insights
- By Alec Drumm on 09-24-18
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Life's Engines
- How Microbes Made Earth Habitable
- By: Paul G. Falkowski
- Narrated by: Nick Sullivan
- Length: 7 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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Paul Falkowski looks "under the hood" of microbes to find the engines of life, the actual working parts that do the biochemical heavy lifting for every living organism on Earth. With insight and humor, he explains how these miniature engines are built - and how they have been appropriated by and assembled like Lego sets within every creature that walks, swims, or flies. Falkowski shows how evolution works to maintain this core machinery of life, and how we and other animals are veritable conglomerations of microbes.
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Best Science Book Ever Written. Period.
- By serine on 07-28-15
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The Blind Watchmaker
- Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design
- By: Richard Dawkins
- Narrated by: Richard Dawkins, Lalla Ward
- Length: 14 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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The Blind Watchmaker, knowledgably narrated by author Richard Dawkins, is as prescient and timely a book as ever. The watchmaker belongs to the 18th-century theologian William Paley, who argued that just as a watch is too complicated and functional to have sprung into existence by accident, so too must all living things, with their far greater complexity, be purposefully designed. Charles Darwin's brilliant discovery challenged the creationist arguments; but only Richard Dawkins could have written this elegant riposte.
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Challenging textbook more than an enjoyable listen
- By Eric on 01-15-12
By: Richard Dawkins
What listeners say about The Ascent of Information
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Desert Reader
- 08-23-24
Great Brain Bias
Written with well-positioned anthropocentric blinders on, causing excellent science reporting to devolve into arrogant humanistic wishful thinking for the future.
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- Anonymous User
- 05-06-22
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
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- Roger Glenn Duncan
- 09-21-23
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.
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- Amazon Customer
- 01-03-23
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.
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