AI And AGI Are Old Hat. When Is Artificial Life (AL)?

We have 3D printers. We have sustainable energy production. We have sensors galore. We finally and definitively have artificial intelligence. We just need to provide the right mandates and cut an “organism” loose.

If we provided a contained environment with the right ingredients, and the artificial intelligence to find sustenance and self preserve using sensors, and finally reproduce (with 4D printing, we can control the life and reproductive cycle), we would have Artificial Life (AL). They may not produce any high art or even hominid societies … yet … but such life can persist and self sustain … at least as long as the ingredients stay available.

Wait, is this what God did? Wait … did he not give us a mandate to preserve all humans or at least to not harm others? Oh wait. He just forgot to throw the “inviolable” switch on in his own design. Wait … why did God not give us endless resources? Oh wait. He has — with the Cosmos. Just that we are still trying to get after it.

So is God just a very advanced human or an AGI or something?

C’mon Musk, Bezos, Nadella, Pichai, Cook and I guess Altman soon … live outside your shareholders’ and your own needs and leapfrog this AI/AGI death march by making Artificial Life (AL). Be actual Gods. Imagine a world with a billion Elons. X would burgeon with er … Musketweeters.

NO NO! ALs are not Altmans!

And no one would listen to the Musketweeters or to anyone anyway. No. No. It won’t be that bad. Even these corporate deities know the economy runs on er … lesser mortals.

Forget AGI, I think artificial life is the next big frontier and I predict we will see some of this in 5 years or less. Makers will just do it and then the Musks, Bezossussuss, Nadellas, Pichais, Cooks and I guess Altmans by then … will swoop in and hijack or buy them out.

C’mon all you childless humans … and er … childless cat ladies. don’t you want to hear the pitter patter of tiny legions of your own artificial race … and stick it to JD?

Good God — what if we could make live couches?!

Imagine cutting your artificial hordes loose on your neighbor’s lawn. C’mon you lawyers, you should invest in this. Imagine the litigation and or criminal trial fees from lawn encroachment based AL murders.

If nothing else, it is a good way to clean up the environment. We have plastic eating bacteria. We have iRobots. Why can’t we have a solar powered amphibian Tesla trawl the ocean for impurities and bring back compacted recyclable plastic bottles and straws? Why can’t these amphibious Teslas reproduce baby Muskitos using the plastic they find? Maybe they just need to come ashore briefly to pick up a microchip for the reproduction.

Ooh … is this what sea turtles do?

Why can’t we have wind mills purifying Los Angeles air and depositing free mascara for goths outside the city? Or feed the pollution to a network of fabricators and lead extractors which in turn feed the metals industry?

Oh wait. Self replicating plastic eaters are complex biochemical lives and we cannot deploy environment cleansing Teslas till the pricing for the golfcarts bottoms out. We need to start with simpler designs and some phased philosophies.

Our Godhood might have to be phased and … er delayed.

Here are some divine iterative releases for artificial life and the philosophical design phases for it.

PHASE 1: SUSTAIN THYSELF— Close one window, open another: Reproduce a new one only if one dies. Keep it simple — no differences in individuals, no genders. Self perpetuation being the objective, a minimum viable design could be to simply replace any deceased or dying artificial life by 3D or 4D printing a new one. Perhaps a stipulated lifetime or total miles or task completion or even a natural condition triggers an end of tenure and the simultaneous creation of the new life. Ideally each AL prints and generates its own replacement. Any design that reproduces artificial life from the waste material or the material gathered from “dead” ALs would be golden! And in the interest of simplicity, the avoidance of contention and the human ideal of equality, all artificial lives can be equal, even genderless. Why would there need to be either individual excess or difference among environment cleansing artificial bots anyway? Such a system of controlled environment and self replication would sustain itself for as long as the environment itself lasts.

Patience grasshopper, thy Godhood approaches.

PHASE 2: BETTER THYSELF — Iron sharpens iron, and one man sharpens another: Even in a controlled environment, unpredictable factors can lead to ALs being either rendered non-functional or terminated prematurely. That could happen in some cases even before it can generate its own replacement. Species improvement for survival becomes the objective. Any paradigm that can periodically determine and introduce survival or functional upgrades would do the trick. Perhaps the ALs can clean the environments and simultaneously gather data to help determine what improvements are warranted such as how to run away from dangerous conditions. Perhaps these environmental ALs can be expanded to gather not just plastic adrift in the sea or soot in the atmosphere but also selectively harvest sea kelp or also grab Carbon Dioxide. Every AL could perhaps “anticipate” its own unnatural end based on gathered data and replace itself just prior to death. It could transfer all its learning and add a small design upgrade, there by preserving and bettering the AL population. Just like iterative software releases. Pick up the next product managed upgrade and incorporate into regeneration process! Only reproduce version next ALs, but still no genders. However, self version identification (with numbers) would probably be useful (if only to let us count our chickens) and should be mandated.

Till a disruptive race of much more powerful bots wipes them out mid tenure so they could take all the girl bots. What? Oh yeah … no gender. Ok. Just kidding. We are still playing God. We wouldn’t allow it! We would monitor such evil and put an end to it. Or perhaps we would introduce such disruptions … er appropriately. Anyway, AL ain’t got feelings … yet.

Hmm. Will we need a separate training entity that retrains the AI in the AL on new data?

OMG! Would we mandate some kind of preference for the lives of upgraded generations? OMG! Could we mandate some kind of natural selection? OMG! Are we God or are we Darwin!

PHASE 3: CONTAIN THYSELF — Only reproduce after network optimization: While improvement efforts are great, they are likely to test the limits of any environment (whether controlled or not) especially when they start to overcome deleterious factors impacting tenure. A scenario where ALs potentially overflow the provided environment is more than likely. What if one upgrade determined by ALs’ AI is to print more than one child AL? The rate of reproduction will also likely demand more resources from our finite environment. Perhaps a reasonable next level design is to create next versions of ALs that are an order of magnitude higher in sophistication, but only after ensuring total population is within resource consumption and other environmental limits. Let new ALs which have multiple upgrades in one generation be birthed … but only after optimizing the resource network and ensuring no danger of overwhelming it. Are we ready to release such ALs?

Can we also mandate no sexism … er ageism … er versionism?

OMG we are better than God!

The best part: these transients … er sentients … ok fine “artificial” lives will matter … and eventually need rights … and representation. And then … in one fell scientific swoop, we will cure politicians of politics with their own nonsense.: You want more votes? Create more ALs (artificial lives not liars) to vote for you. Uh oh … guess you will have to finance that yourself. Spend those pro life Ad Dollars on creating life … er ALs.

Wait! You might be able to buy Ukrainian or Palestinian refugee artificials cheaper. So what if they are refugees, they are enivronment optimized already. Hmm … what if you buy them but leave them where they are and have them mail in votes? Yeah so we will have to muck around a bit with local resources to feed them … but we Americans are kinda doing that already. Surely Netanyahu won’t begrudge some Kugel. Actually he will have to pony up when our local artificials keep the peace … even if they overrun his lawn while doing it.

Wait … what?! Wow … wow … world peace! Achieved with artificial life!

Need I say more?