Tao Tuesday #21
The Tao gives birth to one
Each week I will choose, or open a page and allow a passage to be chosen, from Lao Tzu’s classic text the Tao Te Ching.
I believe Taoist teaching have much to offer in software as in life, so I’ll be adding some thoughts and reflections alongside it.
All excerpts are from Stephen Mitchell’s translation, unless otherwise stated.
Verse 42
The Tao gives birth to one,
One gives birth to two,
Two gives birth to three,
Three gives birth to all things.
All things have their backs to the female,
and stand facing the male.
The male and female combine,
all things achieve harmony.
Ordinary men hate solitude,
But the master makes use of it,
embracing his aloneness, realising
he is one with the whole universe.
I covered this back in Tao Tuesday #9, but it’s been coming back into my mind with a different emphasis recently.
The internet was built on ‘classic’ code systems: brittle, narrow, but perfectly consistent and technically inexhaustible. Once you have a sum(a, b) function, it will run flawlessly and effectively for free, so long as you use it in the correct way.
sum(1, 2) will always return 4.
But sum(‘cat’, ‘hat’) will likely break your app, subtly or otherwise.1
Dynamic, ‘quantum’, AI code, on the other hand, is incredibly malleable, flexible, but expensive to run and non-deterministic.
Put sum(‘cat’, ‘hat’) into an AI and it will likely ask you what you’re trying to do. There is a non-zero chance it might start talking about Doctor Seuss’ Cat in the Hat. It could generate you a picture.
AI was born from the internet.
Combining the yin and yang qualities of both classic and dynamic code gives rise to applications and technology that far surpasses the capabilities of either one alone.
We have witnessed One give birth to Two.
We are now in the process of delivering Three — sum(1,2).
Beyond that?
We shall soon see.
In many languages, this will break or fail to compile. In JavaScript, it will give you ’cathat’. This is why most people hate JS, but I personally find it fun.