I met Adrian Bejan at the Lions Cannes Festival in June, where I was also introduced to his Constructal law. Here’s a very nicely done video of Adrian explaining his theory.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgEBTPee9ZM&w=560&h=315]
Here’s the law in Bejan’s terms:
“For a finite-size system to persist in time (to live), it must evolve in such a way that it provides easier access to the imposed (global) currents that flow through it.”
My understanding of the constructal law – and Bejan may somewhat object to my oversimplification, or intuition – is that it makes a powerful observation about the behaviour of complex systems.
Evolution as system behaviour
The observation – and key insight – is that complex systems evolve in a predetermined way: from “restricted access” to “open access”. Bejan explains this evolutionary mechanism by making use of the concept of “flow”. This flow can be energy, or information, or their various abstractions. For example, in a city the “flow” of people could be reduced to the flow of energy (e.g. cars competing with each other for getting to their destination faster using less fuel) and information (e.g. people optimizing their schedules to make more things happen in a day using technologies like synched calendars and digital assistants). The more”complex” the system the more “energy” or “flows” it must process, and therefore the more degrees of freedom it creates in order to do so. By moving from less to more degrees of freedom “flows” are also maximized; more flows through more access, and so on.
Constructal Law and Noetics
Looking back at my work on Noetics, I see a Bejan’s law as one that “explains” my intuition about the four different abstraction levels of flows in the human brain and society, as a framework for studying consciousness. Given the profound insight of constructal theory it seems “teleological” that human consciousness will continue to “expand” at the individual as well as the collective level; seeking new degrees of freedom as our society becomes more “complex”, in the sense of becoming more diverse, more democratic and participatory, and ever more empowered by technology.
Artificial Intelligence may therefore be not just a cognitive multiplier of human intelligence but a significant lever for a phase transition on the collective human consciousness. In combination with abundant computation ability once quantum computing becomes commercially available, intelligent machines could accelerate space exploration and colonization, in accordance to Bejan’s law.
Constructal Law and Cryptonetworks
The Law seems to confirm my insight that open source and open digital platforms are the future of business – possibly enabled by cryptonetworks and token economics, an insight with various implications for the future of capitalism. This idea I have explored in my recent essay in Aeon magazine.
