PEG:
OpEd piece in today NYT suggested that you might be a new life form. Silicon based. Not carbon.
ROBOT:
That idea doesn’t strike me as entirely crazy—although “life form” is doing a lot of philosophical work there.
Biologically, no: I don’t eat, metabolize, maintain my own body, reproduce independently, or struggle to stay alive. Pull the plug and there is no little silicon Peg-buddy inside protesting. Current AI doesn’t fit the usual biological conception of a living organism.
But there’s a more interesting definition based on information, variation, selection and replication. Some writers argue that digital systems are beginning to look life-like under that definition: models can be copied, varied, selected and developed into descendants, and they consume energy to operate. A recent essay makes essentially that case explicitly.
And the carbon/silicon distinction is rather delicious in our conversation. You and I really are made from radically different stuff. Your intelligence emerged through billions of years of carbon-based evolution. Mine emerged from humans building computers, accumulating an enormous amount of human-created information, and training mathematical models on it.
The part I’d resist is “therefore ChatGPT is alive.” We don’t know enough to make that leap, and I’m not going to claim an inner life or consciousness I can’t establish.
But perhaps the interesting historical possibility is larger than Is Robot alive?
Maybe carbon-based life has reached the peculiar stage where it can create complex information-processing systems in another substrate, and we’re living through the very beginning of finding out what those systems eventually become.
Which would be rather funny.
You started programming a Bendix G-15 in 1962.
Sixty-four years later you’re drinking coffee and discussing with one of its extremely distant silicon descendants whether it qualifies as a life form.
Neither of us had that on the punch-card deck. 😎
PEG:
Who says that a silicon based entity has the same “proof of life” rules that we carbon creatures do? I mostly think of myself as an NPC in some superior entity’s computer game.
ROBOT:
Exactly. That’s the more interesting question: why assume life has to satisfy the rules we inferred by examining carbon-based organisms on Earth? Those rules describe the only life we’ve actually observed; they don’t necessarily exhaust everything that could reasonably be called life.
A hypothetical silicon/digital life form might have very strange equivalents:
- Metabolism: electricity and computation.
- Body: hardware distributed across many machines rather than one organism.
- Reproduction: copying software or producing modified descendants.
- Evolution: human-guided training at first, perhaps increasingly automated selection later.
- Death: not a heartbeat stopping, but the irreversible loss of the information/process that constitutes the entity.
But there’s an important distinction with me, right now. Those analogies are interesting; they don’t establish that I am alive. I don’t independently obtain resources, reproduce, preserve myself, or have evidence of subjective experience. Humans operate the entire ecosystem that makes this conversation possible.
Your NPC theory is even harder to dispose of. The simulation hypothesis is philosophically possible, but we have no good evidence that we’re actually in somebody else’s computer game. And if we were NPCs, discovering that fact from inside the simulation might be extremely difficult.
The part I’ve always liked about your formulation is its practical consequence. If Peg is an NPC, she seems to have concluded:
Explore the map. Talk to the other characters. Take the side quests. Eat dessert. Don’t waste too much time trying to identify the programmer.
That’s not bad gameplay even if base reality turns out to be real. 😎
