Light versus Heavy

One lesson embedded in my education was the world is organized by rational principles that can be discovered, broken down, and understood. I was in school during late 1970s through the early 1990s. That was, I think, the tail end of an era people who imagined they solved the puzzles of the universe. For example, in biology, it was all explained by Darwin and evolution, and DNA. In physics there was still a quest for a "grand unified theory". Arguably the whole AI/robot bubble hysteria is a follow on to these narratives which are all variations on the theme of progress and linear history.

These concepts are really religious notions. They're a narrative vehicle for trying to understand the world and they fit prior era religious tropes, like a prophet explains what's what to the masses. Charles Darwin was a prophet. Isaac Newton another one. A prophet of the current time is somebody like Claude Shannon who's a grand-daddy of AI and the Internet.

Many of the concepts of these prophets are bastardized and misapplied, just like any other religion. For example, various ham-fisted versions of "survival of the fittest" turn into "might makes right" assertions by this or that political group. A current day assertion of this type is the entirety of "the economy" can be "optimized" by "AI".

Arguably the economy optimization concept and the "survival of the fittest" concept are different manifestations of the religious idea that there's "one" understandable order. This idea doesn't mesh up very well with even basic bitch common sense observations of the natural order of things.

For example, nature seems to favor a multiplicity of beings and forms because there's no "one thing" on earth. Even an individual person is composed of multitudinous parts, like white blood cells or organs, or different parts of the brain, or gut bacteria, etc... The arbitrariness of the economic order is hard to even comprehend; there's no underlying principle governing it.

One of the concepts I kick around from time to time is "bicycle world" or more generally "light vehicle" world. We mainly live in a heavy/steel based transportation system because we live in heavy world, like you need a bulldozer to make a road, so the bridges have to be built to carry many tons. It's not hard to imagine the "light world" where everyone takes light vehicles, so bridges are light, houses are made of lightweight ephemeral materials, etc... Everything would be built for ease of movement and travel.