A photo holds only ~42 bytes of information, argues Oxford's Toby Ord in new essay
RyanGreenblatt · x · 2026-09-07
In 'Curating the World,' Oxford philosopher Toby Ord makes a counterintuitive claim: a photograph contains very little information — about 42 bytes — because most of its content is deterministically inferable from prior knowledge of the world.
Ryan Greenblatt pushes back that this amounts to 'pointing into our universe' with time and space — allow the same trick with text and you can likewise encode extremely long environment-random sequences in few bytes. The essay and ensuing debate probe the nature of information, compression, and reality.
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