THE ASCENT OF INFORMATION

We are awash in an ocean of data and are fast drowning.

Scharf, the director of the Columbia Astrobiology Center, opens with a luminous example: the world-changing work of Shakespeare. On the plus side, Shakespeare enriched literature, creating timeless works that are part of the “extended mind” of the species. On the negative side, Shakespeare’s work has required substantial expenditures of energy. “When I crunch the numbers…it is possible that altogether the simple act of human arms raising and lowering copies of Shakespeare’s writings has expended over 4 trillion joules of energy,” writes Scharf, reckoning that if we were coal-fired beings, it would take countless tons to fuel the simple business of picking Shakespeare from the shelf. More energy still is expended in brainpower as neurons fire to comprehend Shakespeare’s language. The energy gambit becomes more material as Scharf arrives at a staggering point: We are so dependent on data and the computer power needed to process it that by the year 2040, those computers will require more electricity than can be produced worldwide. Frustrated by this upper limit, what are we to do? The author probes deeper still, noting how the “dataome” we have created, the informational equivalent of an ecological biome, is changing us even as we change it. In a deep-diving but accessible text that ambles from Sumerian cuneiform to the thought that a planet-saving strategy might be to forgo all those cute GIFs and “hang in there, Kitty” posts on social media, Scharf revises Marshall McLuhan’s thought that the media are extensions of humankind to suggest that we meet information somewhere in the middle, perhaps evading the strictures of Darwinian selection. “We don’t really know if the existing paradigms of terrestrial biology can, or should, describe all of this,” writes Scharf, a thought that ought to keep us awake at night.

An astute, provocative contribution to information science and futurology.