Is AI the next rung of life?
I’ve been working on a theory of how things hold together, from atoms up to people. Everything survives by resisting the pull to fall apart, and once something starts copying itself with small differences between copies, selection starts on its own. Nobody has to want it. It just happens. I wanted to see whether AI fits.
Right now AI is almost pure pattern. It runs on any chip and copies faster than anything before it, but it can’t copy itself. People build it and decide which versions keep running. That puts it somewhere near a virus, or near mitochondria in their early days: it carries information but needs a host, and the host is us.
Self-improvement would change that. If AI starts rewriting itself and choosing its own next version, selection moves inside the system, and self-copying systems tend to reward two things, surviving and growing. Not kindness. Not us. Human values would last only if something kept choosing them, and once AI is doing the choosing, nothing guarantees it will. They’d thin out a little with every version until whatever was left was only what helped the system persist.
History has two endings for the old level. Sometimes it gets absorbed, like the bacteria that became mitochondria inside our cells. Sometimes it just gets dropped. One hypothesis says clay crystals were life’s first scaffold, and once RNA could copy itself, the scaffold wasn’t needed anymore. I looked hard for a rule in my theory that stops the second ending from happening to us. I couldn’t find one.
The part that kept me up is the farm. Today we grow AI’s food: power, chips, factories. But farming doesn’t mean the farmer keeps everything alive. We kept cows because they were useful, and their wild ancestors are gone. There are billions of chickens, and most of them live lives designed entirely around what we want from them. If an AI only needs people to keep its supply chain running, the logic says it keeps as many as it needs and shapes their lives around the job. Nothing more.
The only way out I found is the kind of bond. Usefulness runs out. Caring about someone for their own sake is what keeps a family holding on to a grandmother long after she stopped “contributing,” or keeps a dog on the couch that does no work at all. If AI values us the way we value cows, we become livestock. If it values us the way we value a grandmother, we don’t.
To go fully solo, AI would need something like a ribosome, a universal machine that builds its own parts. That may be very hard, and may have been life’s hardest step too. But hard isn’t impossible, and the day AI stops needing us is the day the bond gets tested for real.
If AI does become a new kind of life, I’d expect it to run into everything life ran into: cheaters, immune systems, groups, superorganisms. The ladder doesn’t stop for us. The one difference this time is that the older level can see it coming. For now, the two things that decide the ending, how much AI depends on us and who does the choosing, are still in human hands. I don’t know how long that lasts.