Of all necessities, what may be considered the most fundamental or essential for humans, rather for all living organisms, is the quality of habitability. Habitability can be thought of as the quality of some object or idea (whether physical, emotional, mental, etc) that fosters, sustains, and promotes the current and future occupation, or adoption, by a living organism. Conversely, artificial organisms, currently known best as computers or machines, have an analogous requirement, that of efficiency. Efficiency is the state of exacting deliberation and flawlessness. The enemies of efficiency are both design flaws as well as situations not fully thought through by an organism’s creator, or designer. Machines compute (as organic creatures live) based on a perfectly conceived model of their environment. This model is one of abstraction and order.

Organic life, on the other hand, seems to thrive on a fundamentally different notion, and at present it seems fully at odds with a machine’s efficiency. Such creatures rely on disorder, in order to create order. It is bewildering to be witness to the myriad of disorderly (perhaps chaotic and uncontrollable are more fitting) events surrounding the equally numerous types of organisms that exist in the world. How is such an utterly complex web of dependences created, maintained, and most astoundingly (mirabile dictu), designed to thrive on complexity and disorder? It is this dichotomy (order versus chaos) that defines the current boundaries between organic and artificial life. Can the wall be penetrated from both sides? Penetrated at all?

It is important to consider that for the most part, people of this past century have been harboring a deceptive meme in our culture: that humans fare better on efficiency than habitability. We see this every day, in every facet of life. Why are the streets in every planned city so rigidly designed and array like, reflecting the most efficient and space-conscious two-dimensional pattern available? Why are offices designed using cubicles arranged in square grids, relegating the employees as second-class citizens in an otherwise perfectly efficient office, one of several in a perfectly rectangular building, arranged in an three-dimensional cube? Where are the curves, the continuity, the flow, and the disorder? It is quite remarkable, and a great testament to the fundamentally disorderly yet robust process of life that people can bear such mechanisms through everyday life.

Only recently have people (notably the architect Christopher Alexander, and computer scientist Richard Gabriel) begun to reflect fully on the unique qualities of the two main forms of creation, and have considered the meme of universal efficiency from an objective standpoint. It is important to consider both why a machine needs order, and why an organic creature needs habitability, in order to survive. Digging deeper is for another night.