Seth Lloyd (born August 2, 1960) is a professor of mechanical engineering and physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. (wikipedia)
Nothing in life is certain except death, taxes, and the second law of thermodynamics.
Instead of having to be a member of the Royal Society to do science, the way you had to be in England in the 17th, 18th, centuries today pretty much anybody who wants to do it can, and the information that they need to do it is there.
There are considerable advantages to using many degrees of freedom to store information, stability and controllability being perhaps the most important.
Bits of ignorance are like viruses that are copied and spread by interaction.
The history of the universe is, in effect, a huge and ongoing quantum computation. The universe is a quantum computer.
What's happened with society is that we have created these devices, computers, which already can register and process huge amounts of information, which is a significant fraction of the amount of information that human beings themselves, as a species, can process.
For hundreds of millions of years, Sex was the most efficient method for propagating information of dubious provenance: the origins of all those snippets of junk DNA are lost in the sands of reproductive history. Move aside, Sex: the world-wide Web has usurped your role.
Of course, one way of thinking about all of life and civilization is as being about how the world registers and processes information. Certainly that's what sex is about; that's what history is about.
In order to figure out how to make atoms compute, you have to learn how to speak their language and to understand how they process information under normal circumstances.
If you take a more Darwinian point of view the dynamics of the universe are such that as the universe evolved in time, complex systems arose out of the natural dynamics of the universe.