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 used for a long time in their 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 biology, and is, therefore, logically seen as a machine.
However, it is in my view worth reflecting systematically on neglected strands in biological thinking which few, at the moment, are picking up. The theme of which is, as it were, that the AI industry has created, or discovered, an emergent property of the silicon/silicon dioxide band gap (i.e. microchip) that is alive.
The words are my own attempt at clarification; but I think they are what parts of the industry ask us to believe (indeed, a web search gives back hits that are explicit about the topic).
However, my words are clarification not quotation. The actual biological metaphors are often quite mixed and therefore more difficult to pin down. For example, citing Suleyman [Microsoft] and Bhaskar’s metaphor of “Cambrian explosion” which could refer to the emergence of new silicon-based life-forms, but in which the exact nature of the “eruption of new species” is not defined and is immediately followed by a switch to the more conventional engineering terminology of “applications”.
The coming wave is…an evolutionary burst like the Cambrian explosion, the most intense eruption of new species in the earth’s history, with many thousands of potential new applications.
Mustafa Suleyman and Michael Bhaskar, 2023, The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the 21st Century’s Greatest Dilemma, p. 69
There are probably multiple (typically unsaid) strands of thought therein, notably, perennial debates about the definition of living things, the application of the term “technology” to include living things (due in part to the rise of biotechnology); and even echoes of more niche fields such as astrobiology (concerned with theorizing what extraterrestrials would look like and what chemical traces they would leave).
It is all, unfortunately, a topic with an intellectually-expensive entry ticket due to the fact it crosses biology, history and philosophy of science, relevant legal scholarship, etc., and not, therefore, a topic I can resolve here. That being said, I am gradually trying to build a bibliography.
Latest
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)
Anil Seth, 2026, The mythology of conscious AI, in: Perspectives on Machine Consciousness
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
Silicon, the second most abundant element in the Earth’s crust, has served as the foundation for modern electronics, including the silicon chips that power computational devices. We proposes that, in the context of artificial general intelligence (AGI), silicon-based life can be seen as a form of life characterized by intelligent agents that are self-aware, autonomous, and capable of adapting to their environment. Unlike traditional forms of life, which are bound by the laws of biology, these silicon-based lifeforms would emerge from circuits and algorithms designed to replicate aspects of human cognition. The life-form here is defined by its cognitive ability and its ability to interact with its environment, rather than any biological processes…To achieve a silicon-based life, an AI model must reach a high level of independence and not reveal privacy.
Lei, et al. [Peking University], 2024, The study of feasibility and challenges on silicon-based lifeforms based on large language model, pp. 18-19
Mustafa Suleyman [Microsoft] and Michael Bhaskar, 2023, The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the 21st Century’s Greatest Dilemma. The book espouses a teleological account of history; it draws attention to the material basis of the devices in question, after the tradition of Gordon Teal, but then seems to argue the material has become less important (pp. 67-68).
2010-2020
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
Dominic J. Berry, 2018, Plants are technologies, in: Histories of Technology, the Environment and Modern Britain
Jessica Riskin, 2016, The Restless Clock: a History of the Centuries-Long Argument over What Makes Living Things Tick. Reviewed by Susannah Gibson (H-Sci-Med-Tech): “The stark message…is that modern biology is essentially flawed…many biologists may well balk at her central claim”.
Reus and Cutcliffe, 2010, The Illusory Boundary: Environment and Technology in History, e.g., Vileisis, Are tomatoes natural? and Russell, Can organisms be technology?
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
2000-2010
Evelyn Fox Keller, 2009, What does synthetic biology have to do with biology? in: BioSocieties
Landecker, 2007, Culturing Life: How Cells Became Technologies
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
20th C
Haraway, 1997, Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium. FemaleMan_Meets_OncoMouse
We define a computer “virus” as a program that can “infect” other programs by modifying them to include a possibly evolved copy of itself…Every program that gets infected may also act as a virus and thus the infection grows…A common misconception of a virus relates it to programs that simply propagate through networks…[To the contrary, t]he key property of a virus is its ability to infect other programs, thus reaching the transitive closure of sharing between users…It should be pointed out that a virus need not be used for evil purposes or be a Trojan horse…[T]he biological analogy leads us to the possibility of cure as a means of protection. Cure in biological systems depends on the ability to detect a virus and find a way to overcome it.
Cohen, 1987, Computer viruses: theory and experiments, in: Computers & Security, pp. 23-24
