I’m not sure I follow what he’s getting at, but I like the style. Reminds me a bit of one of my favorite articles on the ’net (favorite not for its imagined futures, but for its images, mental models & thought experiments):
https://waitbutwhy.com/2017/04/neuralink.html
I agree about the importance of clarity around “information” & “data.” Personally I find them both to be “meaningless words” in the Politics & the English Language sense.
https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/politics-and-the-english-language/. Insofar as the concepts denoted by “information” and “data” might be made meaningful, I’m currently thinking of them something like this.
“Information” is
relative, always defined in reference to an
agent, its
environment, and the agent’s
model of its environment. Any agent has a
body, through which it interfaces with both its
environment and its
internal model of its environment via a set of
sensors and
actuators. “Data” is also relative, always defined in reference to a given set of sensors, their environments, and a set of models of each sensor and its environment. Data is a sequence of observations from a set of sensors, represented according to a set of models of each sample, sensor, and environment. An agent uses its internal model to decide how to act on itself and its environment, and uses data to decide how to update its internal model. Information is defined operationally as data that leads an agent to update its internal model of its environment.
(Just a snapshot of where I’m at on this.. not looking for any feedback in particular but def curious if you have any.)