On Builders & Destroyers

And what they have to do with AI.

The world needs more builders.

Daniel Lubetzky’s new TED talk is moving and straight to the point.

With algorithms, media, and politicians all working to divide us and pushing us to demonize each other - it’s only the uniters and builders who can prevent our societies from falling apart into the kind of hell we’ve seen too much of in the 20th century.

Destruction is always a part of creation

But making always involves remaking. It seems a fact of nature that the universe evolves through these twin forces of creation and destruction:

• The Law of Entropy basically says that the amount of disorder in any system is always increasing. This is physics.

• But I think there is a corollary, let’s call it The Law of Syntropy, which says that the patterns that survive and flourish in this chaotic dance are the ones that are good at creating internal harmony by either exporting, countering, or recycling that increasing disorder.

At every step of unfolding — atoms to molecules, molecules to cells, cells to complex organisms, complex organisms to species and ecosystems—a new sphere of action emerged out of entropy. At first, it is very chaotic. But over time, it harmonizes and reaches equilibrium, in the process giving birth to another new sphere.

Over time, the newly arrived predators learned not to overfeed, leaving healthy populations of prey so that they could continue eating in the future - thus ecosystems were born. Most human societies eventually learned that limiting people to persuasion and eschewing violence works better in the long term - thus laws were born. Most nations have learned that a policy of conquest as a means of achieving desired resources usually backfires - thus the modern international order was born.