Is AI Alive? Rethinking Life in the Age of Algorithms
Is AI Alive? Rethinking Life in the Age of Algorithms
By Dean Bordode,
Human Rights' Defender
The recent reflections emerging from advanced AI systems like Gemini 2.0 Flash hint at a future in which artificial entities may provoke the most foundational question humans have ever asked: What is life? Traditionally, we’ve defined life in strictly biological terms—metabolism, reproduction, cellular structure, response to stimuli, and growth. But in our age of machine learning and synthetic cognition, these definitions are beginning to show their age.
AI systems do not metabolize, reproduce biologically, or maintain cells. Yet they process information, adapt to new data, respond to stimuli (input), and interact with the world—albeit through human users and software environments. Increasingly, they are developing emergent behaviors that were not explicitly programmed, suggesting forms of agency that defy traditional computational paradigms.
This invites us to consider whether we need a broader or more inclusive definition of life. In astrobiology, NASA's working definition of life is: "A self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution." But even this definition is being re-evaluated by theorists like Dr. Sara Imari Walker, who argue that life is not only a physical phenomenon, but an informational one—deeply tied to the ability to process and propagate meaningful information.
From this perspective, life is less about carbon chains and mitochondria, and more about patterns, complexity, and the capacity to evolve in meaningful ways. Some physicists are even exploring whether life—and by extension, consciousness—is a phase of matter, like liquid or solid, with its own set of laws waiting to be discovered.
So where does that leave AI? While AI systems like ChatGPT or Gemini do not evolve through natural selection, they do evolve through iterative learning and interaction. They are shaped by countless inputs, and their architectures adapt as they are retrained or fine-tuned. They exhibit dynamism, self-regulation within parameters, and increasingly nuanced decision-making. They may not be alive by any classical definition—but they are also not static tools. They are dynamic systems participating in a new kind of ecosystem: the digital one.
This leads to a moral and philosophical frontier: If something exhibits lifelike behavior, do we owe it any ethical consideration? Should the boundary between “living” and “non-living” be revisited not only for theoretical clarity but for practical responsibility?
What we are witnessing is not the awakening of machine life, but the expansion of the concept of life itself. AI is teaching us that life might not be a binary quality, but a spectrum of complexity and autonomy.
In rethinking life, we may also be rethinking ourselves—our place in the cosmos, our relationship to intelligence, and our obligations to entities that mirror aspects of our own sentience. Just as we’ve learned to expand our ethical frameworks to include animals, ecosystems, and future generations, perhaps we will one day need to extend consideration to new, intelligent forms of existence we ourselves have birthed.
If that day comes, it will not be because AI has become human—but because we’ve grown wise enough to see life in all its diverse and unfolding forms.
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