## Metadata - Author: [[Francis Spufford ]] - Full Title: Red Plenty - Category: #books ## Highlights - She had her own professional vision which removed her, in some ways, even further from everyday human sympathies, when she was looking through her science’s eyes. She too was a believer in a world that could be reduced, along one dimension of its existence, to information: only in her case, it was the information of the genes, not the information of the computing circuit, which stood as the pattern of patterns. And once you had seen it, once you had parted the curtains of the visible world and seen that human beings were only temporary expressions of ancient information, dimly seen in tiny glimpses by the light of science’s deductive flashlight, but glimpsed enough to tell that it was vast, and intricate, and slowly changing by indifferent rules of its own as it went on its way into a far future – then all the laws and plans of the self-important present looked like momentary tics and jitters in comparison. A dark message, posted from the past to the future; a dark armada, floating through time. Dark masses, moving in the dark. Dark water. Dark ocean swell. ([Location 2627](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0074HCLPE&location=2627)) - You wanted money that means too much. He wanted none of it at all. But we need something to keep score with, something we can control, or how would we ever be able to declare victory? And we must always be able to do that. ([Location 4273](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0074HCLPE&location=4273)) - The machines that Lebedev has made all build up their complicated behaviours from absolutely predictable little events, from valves and then transistors turning on and off. Definitely on; definitely off. Without any shading of degree. Without any ambiguity. The machine that makes Lebedev is different. The base layer of its behaviour, from which all the rest emerges, is various and multiple and uncertain. There is no binary simplicity. There is the slow bubble of many chemical reactions all happening at once, each continuing until a task is mostly done, probably done, done enough to satisfy a programme which was itself only whittled out of randomness just well enough to get by. ([Location 4637](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0074HCLPE&location=4637))