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Remember when Dr. Hawking made himself look pretty goofy by suggesting that computer viruses were a form of life? How many lines of code would it take to make a self-adapting virus? Even then, how easy would it be for us to be able to stop it? Pretty easily, actually. Sure, there's a chance that some goofball has a virus from 1994 on their computer somewhere, but it will have a limited lifespan nevertheless. Sooner or later, someone is going to power down the machine, wipe the hard drive, and trash the computer. No one has designed a virus that can get over that hurdle without the help of humans. It's much easier ( or more attractive to your average cracker) to design a virus that kill itself (ie, one that can bring down a network, attack a power grid, reformat a hard drive). It doesn't matter if all the computers out there have buggy tcp/ip stacks and run windows. I'm not saying if my fractal screensaver suddenly became self-aware, I wouldn't be impressed. We just aren't there yet. We may never be.

As for diseases, cattle, etc, we're getting more efficient at doing what we've been more or less doing for centuries. But is this really "artificial" life we're talking about here? Going back to programming, if I had working source code for any program, I could probably tweak it in all sorts of superficial ways. Doesn't mean that I could write the same thing from scratch. The big difference there is that many could.