What are we? Concepts for biology and AI #science #biology #diverseintelligence

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Main Episode

[00:00] What I thought I would do today is fill you in on some concepts that I think we all need to keep in mind when having discussions about AI and our relationship to it. The first question we want to start to address is what are we, actually? Because that's necessary to understand in order to know whether we are special, whether we are different than the AIs which we create. Commonly, what you'll hear about are two terms. And as I'll argue at the end, I don't think the... This this... These terms will survive the next decade. People talk about, life, and they talk about machines. There are a couple of general different ways that, that the community has been thinking about this, and they fall into two camps. What both camps agree on is that there are these sharp categories called life and machines and that these are quite distinct. This category, which is a large number of mainstream scientists, will say that life... What we mean by life is just a complex machine. If you look down, will see components. You will see parts acting according to laws of chemistry. For example, the molecular reductionist who will say, well, look, ultimately, we're all made of molecular components. Chemistry describes how those components interact, and anything else is basically, fluff. Interestingly, they sort of stop at chemistry. They don't really try to reduce the molecular level down to, let's say, quantum foam or anything like that. Chemistry is kinda where where people like to to stop. Then you've got the organicists, and these are the people that say that, look. Life is never going to be, well understood by machine metaphors. It is an entirely different kind of thing. There are machines, and there are these these dumb, mechanical, things that do exactly what our formal models say they will do, but life is not like that. I occupy a sort of extremely unpopular position. I mean, I think together, two things capture probably 99% of the field. I occupy a very strange sort of position where I would say that it is true that life is not well captured by machine metaphors, but I actually don't believe that anything is well captured by machine metaphors. And I'll talk about... A little bit about this at the end. I... I'm not sure there are any machines in the conventional understanding of what machines are supposed to be. I think the thing that makes us more than what the laws of chemistry are able to describe is basically universal. I think it's it's it's everywhere.