The Information Theory of Aging starts with the primordial survival circuit we inherited from our distant ancestors. - David A. Sinclair

Analog data are superior for this job because they can be changed back and forth with relative ease whenever the environment within or outside the cell demands it, and they can store an almost unlimited number of possible values, even in response to conditions that have never been encountered before.25 The unlimited number of possible values is why many audiophiles still prefer the rich sounds of analog storage systems. But even though analog devices have their advantages, they have a major disadvantage. In fact, it's the reason we've moved from analog to digital. Unlike digital, analog information degrades over time — falling victim to the conspiring forces of magnetic fields, gravity, cosmic rays, and oxygen. Worse still, information is lost as it's copied. No one was more acutely disturbed by the problem of information loss than Claude Shannon, an electrical engineer from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston.

As the venture capitalist and "very large yacht" owner Nick Hanauer wrote in a memo to "My Fellow Zillionaires" in 2014, there is no example in human history where wealth accumulated like this and the pitchforks didn't eventually come out. You show me a highly unequal society, and I will show you a police state. Or an uprising. There are no counterexamples. None. . . . We will not be able to predict when, and it will be terrible — for everybody. But especially for us.

simply keeping people alive — decades after their lives have become defined by pain, disease, frailty, and immobility — is no virtue.