Life inside machines – La la la la la

All cells have life. Viruses and some forms of borderline crystals also have life. So, what is life all about? Is it a DNA strand? Some viruses don’t have DNA, just RNA. Here’s my definition: Life is that which is in motion – outside or inside. Change is life. Replication is life. And most important – survival is life.

Hardware does not change. If you have a Pentium machine, it is the same processor that is present every time you switch it on. Inside the chip is the instruction set which are like the base pairs of a DNA made up of only 4 nucleotides viz. Adenine, Guanine, Thymine, and Cytocine. Note that these can be considered as four instructions in a DNA molecule. In the same way, a machine also has its instruction set.

Accounting software has a different set of instructions than a computer game. But they are both live when they get control. Control of what? The CPU, of course. For the moment that the instructions get executed, or whenever the current flows, life manifests.

The computer has life. It is the software existing inside it. It’s software that breathes life into hardware.

In today’s AI world, software can write/self-correct software. Life has given birth to life. The creation is not perfect like an Ostrich that has wings but still cannot fly. But like evolution, we are on our way to making more usable programs, and then probably the Ostrich won’t need wings or probably we’ll fit artificial ones so that it can reclaim its lost glory – the joy of flying like a bird.

God Bless!