Wednesday, September 19, 2012

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.

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