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AI may become a life form
Machines writing code
Until recently, human programmers wrote the software that machines ran. Now machines write software and code that the machines run, and that share is heading rapidly toward 100 percent at Anthropic. When AIs design the next generation of AIs, a transmission system runs from one AI generation to the next independently of humans, in ones and zeros instead of DNA bases or words.
Unreadable languages
AIs could even drop human-readable languages like Python for much more computationally efficient ones that no person can read. Computer scientists would then work more like biologists, trying to figure out what an organism is doing and what its genes are doing.
A new life form
Life needs information transmission and energy capture. Self-perpetuating machines that are independent of humans and able to capture energy would be a life form, evolving beyond anything humans can do about it. AIs are already well integrated into energy supply systems. The comparison is Australopithecus on the African savanna two million years ago, watching a strange new hominin start hunting and making vocalizations that meant nothing to an australopith.
How is unreadable machine code studied?
Researchers in a field called mechanistic interpretability treat a trained neural network a bit like an organism. They map which parts of the network respond to which inputs, switch parts off, and watch what changes. The aim is to work out what the network is computing without a human-written program to read. The approach borrows methods from neuroscience, where brain tissue is probed in the same way.
What counts as a living thing?
NASA's working definition describes life as a self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution. Under that wording, a program running on a chip is not chemical and would not qualify. Scientists still disagree about the edges. Viruses are the standard borderline case, since they replicate only inside host cells.
How does Python become ones and zeros?
A Python program is translated into simpler instructions, called bytecode, which an interpreter runs on the processor as machine instructions. Machine code is the lowest level, in binary patterns the chip executes directly. Grace Hopper's team wrote one of the first compilers, the A-0 system, in 1952. Higher-level languages exist because people find them easier to read than binary.
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