Hani is a living organism
Biology
This is about biology, the place where all answers lie.
Leonardo da Vinci, probably the greatest inventor of all time, knew that. He spent his whole life observing nature and trying to understand how things worked. He identified the parts of biological things and sketched out inventions that could potentially serve us humans.
We learn from biology and all our ideas are directly or indirectly derived from biology. Because ideas don’t come from nothing, our next ideas and inventions will also be inspired by the advancements and understanding of biology.
The best shitty version
Hani, the company this newsletter is a part of, is also aiming to use the most recent and cutting edge understanding there is of biology, evolution and organisms to structure and organize itself.
In general, when there is new inventions there is two possible outcomes. Either, the inventors get it wrong by misunderstanding or misinterpreting the biological and the invention doesn’t stand the test of time, or the inventors get it right and the invention is a shittier version of what evolution has come up with.
Therefore, Hani needs to be the best shitty version of what biology has to offer.
Organisms
What is really interesting to Hani is the question of: What constitutes the most sophisticated organisms there is? It’s interesting from a macro level, meaning the organisms themselves and the connections formed with their environments, but also from a micro level, meaning the different systems constituting the organisms, the different parts constituting each system as well as the interaction of these parts.
Lessons for Hani from biology
Snippets from a conversation between Lex Friedman and Michael Levin.
Lex: “[…] I don’t know how we go from a computer to a biological system in the future.”
Michael: “The thing about biology is, it’s all about making really important decisions, really quickly, on very limited information. I mean that’s what biology is all about. You have to act now, the stakes are really high and you don’t know most of what you need to know to be perfect. And so there is not even an attempt to be perfect or get it right in any sense. There are just things like active inference, minimize surprise, optimise efficiency and things like this that guide the whole business. “
[…]
Michael: “Biology/Evolution doesn’t take the past too seriously, cause it makes these problem solving machines as opposed to deal exactly with what happened last time.”
[…]
Michael: “Biology doesn’t assume that everything is the way it is expected to be. There is an enormous tolerance for change. It is able to do what it needs to do even if circumstances change.”
Lex: “Problem solving versus memory recall.”
[…]
Michael: “Intelligence is being able to reach the same goal through completely different means. Yes it’s important for the cells to do the right stuff but they have incredible tolerances for things not being what you expect and still getting their jobs done. Most organisms are very plastic.”
[…]
Michael: “To sum up: evolution is really good at creating hardware that has a very stable baseline mode, meaning that left to its own devices its very good at doing the same thing but it has a bunch of problem solving capacity such as if any assumption don’t hold it will still get most of what it needs to do done.”