I don’t see AI or simulations as being an attempt to create life, at least not yet.
We are all pretty much agreed that whatever life is, we don’t yet have a good solid definition.
Rather AI gives us results and shows us the boundaries of what might/might not be considered “life”.
Is it some kind of pattern? A pattern that has, above all else, a sense of self-preservation?
Something interesting to think about - we all have heard of computer “viruses” (sic, SB virii).
We wouldn’t call that life by any stretch of the imagination.
But imagine forty years from now, some guy finds an old PC in his basement, plugs it into the “interspace” (or whatever it is called by then), and an old virus, long deemed extinct and no threat to the web, resurfaces and re-infects millions of PCs or cell phones or whatever they have then.
Just seems to me the parallels are fascinating. Remember, it was only recently they drilled into Lake Vostok in Antarctica, and exposed the life there to our surface. Life that has not been on the surface for hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years!
But there's the rub: "Life" according to whose description/definition? If you can't define it, how are you ever going to find its "boundaries?"
On the other hand, the idea of Life would seem to imply the idea of "self-preservation"....
Thanks so much for writing, dear djf!