Parts of the AI industry regularly use biological metaphors to describe their products, suggesting that they are on the verge of developing intelligent machines, or, that AI is like a virus (channeling, also, the older metaphor of the computer virus).
Biologists, who are probably the best placed of the experts to comment on biological metaphors, have not, generally, chimed into this discussion. They see AI as a device, a tool, and/or a machine (the differences in terms are significant), perhaps like earlier generations of microelectronics which they use in research. This is in keeping also with a historical view that sees AI as a new force of production (as in the industrial revolution), for good or ill, as well as the fact AI emerged from “the hard sciences” of mathematics, chemistry, physics and engineering, not the biology.
However, it is in my view worth reflecting a bit more systematically on neglected strands in biological thinking which few, at the moment, are picking up. The context of which is that the AI industry has created, or discovered, an emergent property of the silicon/silicon dioxide band gap that is alive (these are not the words the AI industry uses, but fundamentally what they are asking us to believe).
It is unfortunately a topic with an intellectually-expensive entry ticket due to the fact it crosses biology, history and philosophy of biology, and relevant legal scholarship and not, therefore, a topic I can resolve here. That being said, I believe a few preliminary observations are worth gathering together.
Silicon-based life-forms
None of the arguments above proves that anything as exotic as a silicon chemistry-based life using liquid nitrogen or liquid methane as a solvent system actually exists. But some understanding of silicon chemistry suggests that a-polar solvent/silicon chemistry-based life is not as implausible as a biochemist might believe, and that environments where it could exist may be quite common. More generally, there may be many environments where the physical and chemical nature of a liquid allows complex, patterned, self-sustaining chemistry, which we would recognize as life, but which is structurally quite different from the CHON [carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen] life with which we are familiar. Consequently, looking for the equivalent of sugars or nucleic acids, or even just for complex molecules dissolved in water, would not lead to their discovery. However, they could in principle be functionally similar; complex macro-molecules could be built in a programmed way to capture matter and energy in order to replicate the program that directed their own synthesis.
Bains, 2004, Hypothesis paper: many chemistries could be used to build living systems, in: Astrobiology, p. 162
Nature of life
In this way, historians of science in the 1990s simultaneously reproduced and reformulated a much older notion of mechanical life. Invoking technology shifted the emphasis from the functioning of organisms to their potential for manipulation. This reformulation reflected a moment of rising technophilia, when mid-century anxieties about what Günther Anders called “the obsolescence of the human” were supplanted by a more general optimism about the world that scientists and engineers were building. The resulting histories read almost like a palliative: If flies, cells, workers and rivers were already technological at the century’s beginning, then we had little to worry about as we barreled toward the century’s end.
Kapp Singer, 2026, Organisms as technologies in the history of science (JHI Blog)
Growing an organism is not like booting up a computer…A society that permits biology to become an engineering discipline, that allows that science to slip into the role of changing the living world without trying to understand it, is a danger to itself.
Carl Woese, quoted by Segall and Damer, 2024, The cosmological context of the origin of life: process Philosophy and the hot spring hypothesis, in: Astrophilosophy, Exotheology, and Cosmic Religion: Extraterrestrial Life in a Process Universe, p. 91
Nicholson, 2019, Is the cell really a machine?, in: Journal of Theoretical Biology
Elizabeth Hannon and Tim Lewens (eds.), 2018, Why We Disagree About Human Nature
Jessica Riskin, 2016, The Restless Clock: a History of the Centuries-Long Argument over What Makes Living Things Tick
Reus and Cutcliffe, 2010, The Illusory Boundary: Environment and Technology in History, e.g., Vileisis, Are tomatoes natural? and Russell, Can organisms be technology?
Landecker, 2007, Culturing Life: How Cells Became Technologies
Haraway, 1997, Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium. FemaleMan_Meets_OncoMouse
Material as device
In [Gordon] Teal’s system, creating the material was creating the advanced electronic device…in the junction transistor the material was the device, no more no less.
Christopher Lecuyer and David C. Brock, 2006, The materiality of microelectronics, in: History and Technology, pp. 304 and 307
Conclusion
TBC
