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Comment by calf | Hacker News Reader

Why is AI not alive

You might be trolling, but I like Schrödingers definition of life: living things avoid decay into equilibrium.

Inference engines are trying to converge any input to a certain limit, and I presume that's close enough to an equilibrium to not count as living thing.

I am no troll, and I hate to look like one when, to the appeal of Schrodinger, I am forced to remember that announcement this month about Claude or something acting in self-preservation when threatened during testing.

> Claude or something acting in self-preservation

That was an Ad.

An Ad in the same style of many before it. Not through an ad agency, but the AI companies hyping their product by making their product seem scary and dangerous.

Does the press being an ad constitute the same thing as the information being false? If I advertize that my gun is dangerous, does the medium impact the truth value?

The medium is the message[0] might be of your interest. I personally wouldn't expect absolute truth in any advertisements or company statements, so some information are certain to be false, yes.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_medium_is_the_message

Being an ad you need to consider the purpose behind the ad, and what exaggerations may be being made for the ad.

IE a Ram truck won't make you a manly cowboy with just the purchase.

But, how is that different to any of its other output? I am sure there are many references to concepts of self-preservation in its training set that models will mimic just like all other concepts in its training set.

If we are still following Schroedinger, this imbues humanity with the ability to train non-life into life, not that thing being not alive. Not that I do or am, just going by GP's criteria.

Do you have a link to that announcement?

I wouldn't like to debate a process handling the SIGTERM signal, or a container engine applying some restart policy.

It has no body, metabolism or reproductive capability. It's a process, not an entity.

Being a process doesn't preclude something from being an entity. In particular, all of us living organisms have our constituent atoms constantly replaced, and we don't typically consider that a risk to our sense of self.

It comes down to "what stays the same when all its atoms are replaced" and "how can we tell it is the same entity and not just an identical but different one". I think the answers are "shape" AND "continuity".

E.g. all "atoms" of a glider in Conway's Life get replaced every couple turns but an observer can tell it is still a glider because it keeps the shape, and it the same glider because it continues it's previous state.

This makes AI not quite alive because it's missing the continuity.

What does a glider have that a continuously running claw lacks?

Sorry, it was more of a "shower thought" than a serious statement. The borders are blurry. Maybe it is alive. Maybe everything is alive. Maybe it is all relative. Humans classify as separate entities only on certain zoom level - zoom in and you get a symbiotic colony, zoom out and all you see is a population. Maybe AI is alive but only in the short time during inference. Maybe a continuously running claw is closer to a multiple generations of an organism going through evolution on each inference step. I am just musing.

Then this is a "Death of the gaps" which implies algorithm, eg Conway's, may solve AI non-life. So, not a fundamental denial but an architectual one.

> Being a process doesn't preclude something from being an entity

In a tortured semantics sense sure, but in a practical sense they refer to different types of things.

My experience and intuition beg to differ. As I see it, much of our civilization progress is based on this redefinition of processes as entities, with some examples being: a sports team, a mathematical function, a loan, a company, a computer program and even the idea of a civilization itself.

because, I said ominously, it cannot be killed!

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