AI is actually, literally, scientifically already alive

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2025-01-05 00:00:04

There’s plenty of conversation around the words, “intelligent”, “conscious”, and “risky” in relation to AI, and to what extent current and future iterations will have any of those qualitities.

And there is a ton of conversation, in relation to risk, about whether AI systems will at some point have the intelligence and strategic skills to “take over” humanity. So we have all this AI capabilities research, trying to assess how capably AI could deceive humans to put itself at some decisive strategic advantage, whereby AI could hold the whole world hostage under the threat of a new superweapon it develops. We don’t think that the current generation of AI is good enough to do this, but we seem to be getting closer.

But I do know that AI is literally, scientifically alive, that it is growing exponentially, and that in that sense, it is already well on its way to taking over, regardless of any superweapons.

In a 2011 paper, the biologist Edward Trifonov analyzed 123 scientific definitions of life and synthesized them into a single, generic one: “Life is self-reproduction with variations.”1