Everything is a Machine

Ray Dalio’s Principles left an impression on me:

Everything is a Machine

When I think about this in a high level, where machines are not just “mechanical” devices created by humans - the interactions, the systems.

• Plants are machines to grow, reproduce, repeat.
• Digestive systems: a machine to process foods into energy.
• Computer systems: a machine to connect humans to the digital.

Essentially, Life is a machine to create new life.

Taking this perspective - I see machines are everywhere.

• Businesses are a machine that creates value.
• Money is a machine to exchange value between humans.
• Financial systems are money machines.

When we get into the abstract, this gets more interesting.

• The Earth is a machine that sustains life.
• The Sun is a machine that generates energy.
• The Universe is a machine of…?

Thinking about things as machine is nice. Machines have an input and an output. I start to think about what are these? How do they interact? What other machines does this machine depend on?

This ia great model to think of the world. It’s accurate, scales, and sets boundaries so complex systems are digestable.

Ray Dalio’s Princples has other lessons that I will revisit in the future.

• A book is a machine that conveys thoughts from the author to the reader.
• Writing is a machine that makes the author logically construct their thoughts.
• Reading a machine to receive another’s thoughts.

Machines everywhere!