Life, death and antifragility
I have been involved in building complex software systems for about 30 years. In 2018 I attended a business meeting in which a colleague talked to us about how to build systems that can withstand external threats. I remember that meeting well. Not only did I hear about antifragility for the first time, but I never thought in that context that I would hear a very profound consideration of the eternal dilemma of the relationship between life and death.
This is the definition of antifragility found on Wikipedia1:
Antifragility is a property of systems in which they increase in capability to thrive as a result of stressors, shocks, volatility, noise, mistakes, faults, attacks, or failures. The concept was developed by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his book, Antifragile, and in technical papers. As Taleb explains in his book, antifragility is fundamentally different from the concepts of resiliency (i.e. the ability to recover from failure) and robustness (that is, the ability to resist failure).
Antifragility is a property oriented toward adaptation and improvement in a hostile situation. Robustness and resilience, on the other hand, “merely” enhance the degree of protection and survival in a hostile situation. To summarize, an antifragile system not only remains intact following an offense, but also improves its own characteristics.
Going back to the business meeting in 2018, the colleague told us about antifragile software systems, and he gave us some examples that I frankly do not remember. However, I remember very well that he concluded the roundup of examples with the following sentence that struck me as profound:
“Death is what makes life antifragile, that is, able to adapt to changes in the environment. Without death, life could not evolve.”
These few words echo a concept found in many philosophies and religions. Death is not the absence of life, but a phase of existence necessary to allow life itself to evolve. If we think about it, every day millions of cells in our bodies die to make way for newborn cells so that our individual lives can continue. If we remained static, if our exhausted cells did not give way to new ones, we would be doomed to get sick or die.
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