Preservation of information

Quick reaction to a GigaOm post from today on disappearance of information (on the web, but it's really a broader trend).

The underlying assumption behind the "alarm" over disappearance is that all information is/should be persistent (and by implication has constant value over time.).  It doesn't - the world is built on decay (entropy...). There are multiple information-decaying forces at work. For example, most information exponentially diminishes in value over time (as do most people - they tend to eventually die). There are of course similar, opposite forces driving the preservation impulses: information (being remembered and sending messages over time) is the only practical way people have found to achieve a tiny bit of immortality. Just two of many interesting properties of information that we tend to overlook.

Update: a beautiful example of life using transient information messages to preserve itself (HT @adrianho).

Note: this is a post in series on information.

Sanctity of life = Sanctity of information

Pro-life advocates - please meet information privacy advocates!

The pro-life/pro-choice debate still seems oddly oblivious to the core reality of a fundamental relationship of life and information.

Life in its simplest form is a self-replicating beautiful/magical/sacred pattern of molecules. 

Information is a pattern of physical features with consequences. 

At the macro level information can determine life - a verbal command (or click of a mouse) could signal a firing squad (or a drone) to kill someone.

What for some reason still does not seem to be widely appreciated (and what I've been anticipating to become a topic of heated discussion for over twenty years) is that at the micro level life (and potential life) is information. DNA sequences can be synthesized from computer files - artificial life forms have been synthetically created and there are no fundamental technical reasons that prevent this technology from eventually being applied to humans. The technology is read/write: a human DNA sequence can be read (scanned/digitized) as well as written (synthesized.) 

What then does it mean to destroy a data file that could have been used to create life?  Will the debate about deleting a file that could have become a person be less heated then the debate about terminating life support for a bunch of human cells that used to be person?

As this question is pondered, the abortion and privacy debates are likely to get even more convoluted as they both evolve into debates about information and our rights regarding information.  

There is a short and rapidly diminishing distance between information about us and information that is us.

Note: this is a post in series on information.

Information = a pattern with consequences

What is information?

Information is a pattern with consequences.


This is a short definition of information that I wrote down a few years back and keep coming back to.  

Why define information? 

Because despite having declared ourselves an "information society" half a century ago we have not paid much attention to it.  Most people today cannot define what information is.  I believe that information does have certain fundamental properties and laws that shape many key aspects of the world we live in, the same way laws of thermodynamics do. Many of the big social and technological issues facing us today are already driven by those properties and many more will be.

The industrial revolution and the age of steam engines ushered a deep understanding (or at least appreciation) of the fundamental laws governing energy. They are part of basic education today. Defining and discussing fundamental properties and laws of information is not part of basic education, but it should be.

I believe that many of today's hottest issues can be and should be looked at through the lens of information and will from time-to-time comment on some of them. First up: information & life.