Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies

This infiniteness is what Prigogine calls the entropy barrier, and it is what provides a perspective of time that is not spatialized like the theories of time advanced by Newton and Einstein.

“The main challenge of coaching a team is not figuring out a game plan, but getting that game plan into the heads of the players. Since in the case of robots I do not see that as a challenge, I kindly decline your offer.”

So time is irreversible in a statistical system because the chaotic nature of systems of many particles implies that an infinite amount of information would be needed to reverse the evolution of the system. This also means that statistical systems cannot go backward because there are an infinite number of paths that are compatible with any present.

economic development is based not on the ability of a pocket of the economy to consume but on the ability of people to turn their dreams into reality. Economic development is not the ability to buy but the ability to make.

The universes predicted by Boltzmann and Maxwell, and later refined by the thermodynamics of Helmholtz, Gibbs, and Einstein, were universes that evolved into homogeneous soups—soups in which there was no information and energy was no longer free (that is, there was no energy available to perform work).3

This is another way of saying that the $2.5 million worth of value was stored not in the car’s atoms but in the way those atoms were arranged.3 That arrangement is information.4

Prigogine’s entropy barrier forbids the present to evolve into the past, except in idealized systems, like a pendulum or planetary orbits, which look the same going forward and backward (when there is no dissipation involved).

in a world where knowledge and knowhow are trapped in social networks and are difficult to copy, we should expect large differences in countries’ abilities to crystallize imagination, since differences in the knowledge and knowhow available in a given country should be reflected in the set of products that each country is able to produce.

For information to truly grow, the universe needs one more trick. This is the ability of matter to process information, or the ability of matter to compute.