What Technology Wants (10 page)

At the very bottom of the basement lies the final end state known as heat death. It is absolutely still. There is no movement because there is no difference. No potential. Picture it as lightless, silent, and identical in all directions. All distinctions—including the elemental distinction between this and that—have been spent. This hell of uniformity is called maximum
entropy
. Entropy is the crisp scientific name for waste, chaos, and disorder. As far as we know, the sole law of physics with no known exceptions anywhere in the universe is this: All creation is headed to the basement. Everything in the universe is steadily sliding down the slope toward the supreme equality of wasted heat and maximum entropy.

We see the slope all around us in many ways. Because of entropy, fast-moving things slow down, order fizzles into chaos, and it costs something for any type of difference or individuality to remain unique. Each difference—whether of speed, structure, or behavior—becomes less different very quickly because every action leaks energy down the tilt. Difference within the universe is not free. It has to be maintained against the grain.

The effort to maintain difference against the pull of entropy creates the spectacle of nature. A predator such as an eagle sits atop a pyramid of entropic waste: In one year 1 eagle eats 100 trout, which eat 10,000 grasshoppers, which eat 1 million blades of grass. Thus it takes, indirectly, 1 million blades of grass to support 1 eagle. But this pile of 1 million blades far outweighs the eagle. This bloated inefficiency is due to entropy. Each movement in an animal's life wastes a small bit of heat (entropy), which means every predator catches less energy than the total energy the prey consumed, and this shortfall is multiplied by each action for all time. The circle of life is kept going only by the constant replenishment of sunlight showering the grass with new energy.

This inevitable waste is so harsh and unavoidable that it is astounding that any organization can persist for long without rapidly dissolving to cold equilibrium. Everything we find interesting and good in the cosmos—living organisms, civilization, communities, intelligence, evolution itself—somehow maintains a persistent difference in the face of entropy's empty indifference. A flatworm, a galaxy, and a digital camera all have this same property—they maintain a state of difference far removed from thermal undifferentiation. That state of cosmic lassitude and stillness is the norm for most atoms of the universe. While the rest of the material cosmos slips down to the frozen basement, only a remarkable few will catch a wave of energy to rise up and dance.

This rising flow of sustainable difference is the inversion of entropy. For the sake of this narrative, call it
exotropy
—a turning outward.
Exotropy
is another word for the technical term
negentropy,
or negative entropy
.
It was originally coined by the philosopher Max More, though he spelled it extropy. I've appropriated his term with an alternative spelling to heighten its distinction from its opposite entropy. I prefer
exotropy
over
negentropy
because it is a positive term for an otherwise double negative phrase meaning “the absence of the absence of order.” Exotropy, in this tale, is far more uplifting than simply the subtraction of chaos. Exotropy can be thought of as a force in its own right that flings forward an unbroken sequence of unlikely existences.

Exotropy is neither wave nor particle, nor pure energy, nor supernatural miracle. It is an immaterial flow that is very much like information. Since exotropy is defined as negative entropy—the reversal of disorder—it is, by definition, an increase in order. But what is order? For simple physical systems, the concepts of thermodynamics suffice, but for the real world of cucumbers, brains, books, and self-driving trucks, we don't have useful metrics for exotropy. The best we can say is that exotropy resembles, but is not equivalent to, information and that it entails self-organization.

We can't make an exact informational definition of exotropy because we don't really know what information is. In fact the term
information
covers several contradictory concepts that should have their own terms. We use
information
to mean (1) a bunch of bits or (2) a meaningful signal. Confusingly, bits rise but signals decrease when entropy gains, so one kind of information increases while the other kind decreases. Until we clarify our language, the term
information
is more metaphor than anything else. I try to use it in the second meaning here (not always consistently): Information is a signal of bits that makes a difference.

Muddying the waters further, information is the reigning metaphor of the moment. We tend to interpret the mysteries surrounding life in imagery suggested by the most complex system we are aware of at the time. Once nature was described as a body, then a clock in the age of clocks, then a machine in the industrial age. Now, in the “digital age,” we apply the computational metaphor. To explain how our minds work, or how evolution advances, we apply the pattern of a very large software program processing bits of information. None of these historical metaphors is wrong; they are just incomplete. Ditto for our newest metaphor of information and computation.

But exotropy, as rising order, must entail more than information alone. We have thousands of years of science ahead of us, and thousands of metaphors. Information and computation can't be the most complex immaterial entity there is, just the most complex we've discovered so far. We might eventually discover that exotropy involves quantum dynamics, or gravity, or even quantum gravity. But for now, information (in the sense of structure) is a better analogy than anything else we know of for understanding the nature of exotropy.

From one cosmic perspective, information is the dominant force in our world. In the initial era of the universe, back just after the big bang, energy dominated existence. At that time radiation was all there was. The universe was a glow. Slowly, as space expanded and cooled, matter took over. Matter was clumpy, unevenly distributed, but its crystallization generated gravity, which began to shape space. With the rise of life (in our immediate neighborhood), information ascended in influence. The informational process we call life took control of the atmosphere of Earth several billion years ago. Now the technium, another informational processing, is reconquering it. Exotropy's rise in the universe (from the perspective of our planet) might look like the chart on the opposite page, where E = energy, M = mass, and I = information.

The multibillion-year rise of exotropy—as it flings up stable molecules, solar systems, a planetary atmosphere, life, mind, and the technium—can be restated as the slow accumulation of ordered information. Or rather, the slow ordering of accumulated information.

This is more clearly seen at the extreme. The difference between four bottles of nucleotides on a laboratory shelf and the four nucleotides arrayed in your chromosomes lies in the additional structure, or ordering, those atoms get from participating in the spirals of your replicating DNA. Same atoms, but more order. Those atoms of nucleotides acquire yet another level of structure and order when their cellular host undergoes evolution. As organisms evolve, the informational code their atoms carry is manipulated, processed, and reordered. In addition to genetic information, the atoms now convey adaptive information. They gain order from the innovations that survive. Over time, the same atoms can be promoted to new levels of order. Perhaps their one-cell home joins another cell to become multicellular—that demands the informational architecture for a larger organism as well as a cell. Further transitions in evolution—the aggregation into tissues and organs, the acquisition of sex, the creation of social groups—continue to elevate the order and increase the structure of the information flowing through those same atoms.

Dominant Eras of the Universe.
The relative dominant force in our local area of the universe has shifted since the big bang. Time is indicated on a log scale, its units exponentially increasing over time. On this scale a few nanoseconds at the dawn of time occupy the same horizontal distance as a billion years today.

For four billion years evolution has been accumulating knowledge in its library of genes. You can learn a lot in four billion years. Every one of the 30 million or so unique species alive on the planet today is an unbroken informational thread that traces back to the very first cell. That thread (DNA) learns something new each generation and adds that hard-won knowledge to its code. Geneticist Motoo Kimura estimates that the total genetic information accumulated since the Cambrian explosion some 500 million years ago is 10 megabytes per genetic lineage (such as a parrot or a wallaby). Now multiply the unique information held in every individual organism by the total number of organisms alive in the world today and you get an astronomically large treasure. Imagine the Noah's Ark of digital storage that would be needed to carry the genetic payload of every organism on Earth (seeds, eggs, spores, sperms). One study estimated the Earth harbored 10
³⁰
single-cell microbes. A typical microbe, such as a yeast, produces one one-bit mutation per generation, which means one bit of unique information for every organism alive. Counting the microbes alone (about 50 percent of the biomass), the biosphere today contains 10
³⁰
bits, or 10
²⁹
bytes, or 10,000 yottabytes of genetic information. That's a lot.

And that is only the biological information. The technium is awash in its own ocean of information. It reflects 8,000 years of embedded human knowledge. Measured by the amount of digital storage in use, the technium today contains 487 exabytes (10
²⁰
) of information, many orders smaller than nature's total, but growing exponentially. Technology expands data by 66 percent per year, overwhelming the growth rate of any natural source. Compared to other planets in the neighborhood, or to the dumb material drifting in space beyond, a thick blanket of learning and self-organized information surrounds this orb.

There is yet one more version of the technium's cosmic story. We can view the long-term trajectory of exotropy as an escape from the material and a transcendence into the immaterial. In the early universe, only the laws of physics reigned. The rules of chemistry, momentum, torque, electrostatic charges, and other such reversible forces of physics were all that mattered. There was no other game. The ironclad constraints of the material world birthed only extremely simple mechanical forms—rocks, ice, gas clouds. But the expansion of space, with its corresponding increase in potential energy, introduced new immaterial vectors into the world: information, exotropy, and self-organization. These new organizational possibilities (like a living cell) did not contradict the rules of chemistry and physics but flowed from them. It is not as if life and mind were simply embedded in the nature of matter and energy; but rather, life and mind emerged out of the constraints to transcend them. Physicist Paul Davies summarizes it well: “The secret of life does not lie in its chemical basis. . . . Life succeeds precisely because it evades chemical imperatives.”

Our present economic migration from a material-based industry to a knowledge economy of intangible goods (such as software, design, and media products) is just the latest in a steady move toward the immaterial. (Not that material processing has let up, just that intangible processing is now more economically valuable.) Richard Fisher, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, says, “Data from nearly all parts of the world show us that consumers tend to spend relatively less on goods and more on services as their incomes rise. . . . Once people have met their basic needs, they tend to want medical care, transportation and communication, information, recreation, entertainment, financial and legal advice, and the like.” The disembodiment of value (more value, less mass) is a steady trend in the technium. In six years the average weight per dollar of U.S. exports (the most valuable things the U.S. produces) dropped by half. Today, 40 percent of U.S. exports are services (intangibles) rather than manufactured goods (atoms). We are steadily substituting intangible design, flexibility, innovation, and smartness for rigid, heavy atoms. In a very real sense our entry into a service- and idea-based economy is a continuation of a trend that began at the big bang.