"Living Computers – Replicators, Information Processing, and the Evolution of Life"

The talk starts at 10:15, coffee will be served from 10:00. Please help us cut down waste by bringing your own mug.

Abstract:

Few will disagree that an essential feature of life is its ability to process information. Every animal brain does this, every living cell does this, and even more fundamentally, evolution is incessantly processing information residing in the entire collection of genomes on Earth via the genetic algorithm of Darwin’s survival of the fittest. There is no life without information. 

It can be argued that until very recently on the evolutionary timescale, i.e. until human language evolved less than a million years ago, most information that existed on Earth and was durable enough to last for more than a generation, was recorded in DNA or in some other polymer molecules. The emergence of human language changed this; with language, information started accumulating in other media, such as clay tablets, paper, or computer memory chips. Most likely, information is now growing faster in the world’s libraries and computer clouds than in the DNA of all genomes of all species. We can refer to this “new” information as cultural information as opposed to the genetic information of DNA. Cultural information is the basis of a civilisation; genetic information is the basis of life underpinning it. Thus, if genetic information got too damaged, life, cultural information, and civilisation itself would disappear soon. 

But could this change in the future? There is no civilisation without cultural information, but can there be a civilisation without genetic information? Can our civilisation outlast the Solar system in the form of AI? Or will genetic information always be needed to underpin any civilisation? If you are interested in these questions, you are welcome to my talk and to read my book Living Computers, recently published by Oxford University Press.