Artificial intelligence might be the closest science has come to creating life

@irene that's heavily debatable, the stuff at the forefront of AI research is quickly nearing the sophistication which you'd call life.
Also, real world life can be pretty damn unsophisticated. Look at basic microbes.

@theKarlisK you're talking about the Craig Venter artificial microbes thing? Yeah.

@irene indeed, I agree with that. And adapting is exactly what AI is good at. Especially the new general AI designs. So yeah, not really a pipe dream.

What about that sheep that they cloned? Well that was fun.

Well, if we decide that description of life proposed by biology is a defenition, I could argue that robots that build robots are alive.

This is obviously a post meant to trigger people, please avoid it.

AI is only close to life if you combine it with blockchain, internet of things, industry 4.0, big data, quantum computing algorithms and the most recent JavaScript framework. Did I forget anything?

@Fast-Nop don't forget that it's all serverless!

the assumption that a thing is either alive or not might be inaccurate .. life is a decimal not a bool, imo

@irene I mean the property that soemthing is alive is not either true or false, it's more like each thing has a numeric value of how "much" alive it is

@xalez I don’t think so. Alive concept is definitely binary but to decide if a thing is alive there are many factors to define but I’ve never heard anything like humans are more alive than plants.

I think instincts are primal part of being alive(have you seen the pun there?). If a being is afraid of death or getting turned off or getting broken, and actively takes measures against it(yes plants also try to do that). I’d say there is life there.

@neriald the definition of "afraid" is subjective, how can you tell if something is actually afraid? i.e. characters in a game might appear afraid of death and behave very close to how a human might, in the limited context of the game ... I think there is a big part of life attributed to being conscious, which in itself is something we assume and cannot really measure, so we only measure the behavior that suggests something is afraid of death, which is relatively simple to simulate

@irene hmm .. maybe the whole definition of life is a bit meaningless .. almost like selecting a set of things and calling them X, then wondering what else might fit in X .. which is not very well defined and kind of inconsequential

maybe conscious is the actual thing that has consequences (whether a software becomes conscious is a bit more meaningful)

@irene I did, I am just not sure why you chose those things.
suppose we make a solar powered computer with bit of software that keeps recreating itself .. this kind of meets your conditions but I doubt you'd call it alive?

@irene well, reproduction is neihter. The self supporting nature is also debateble. Think of symbiotes and parasites. But if under self supporting you mean it seeks out necessary resources and can process them it might be closer but still feels a bit off. Most it the advanced organism have offsprings that are dependent on their parents, society to feed them and keep alive them until they develop the necessary skills to gather those themselves. In this perspective the organism created by scientist is just a child. It can process resources and can self suport its functions by that but needed to be fueld by scientist. If there is more support needed for it then its not alive but the point is there are a bunch of life forms out there and its quite complicated to define a general definition about what is alive and what isnt

as @xalez said, just trying to create a definition is futile in itself. Humans categorizes things for a reason, not for the sake of differentiating things but relevant classifications for avoiding threat, recognising our surroundings, to be able to communicate meaning and a lot more. You cant really create a definition of life without a context or purpose

Until we dont have THE answer for the meaning/purpose of life we cant create a universal definition for it.

@irene, you probably added recreation for your definition because you belive that the purpose of life is or at least partialy to recreate and sustain the life of our species

(sorry for the spam and wall of text but it is a really good subject even if at this point its not too relevant on devrant)

@irene so if an AI is good enough at keeping itself alive, it doesn't need to reproduce?

@irene I think it's just as likely that this AI would see other AI as a threat to its existence and therefore wouldn't create any copies of itself.

Question about life is complex and often depends on referential.

If you look at the earth for example， or mountains. They look like a big lump of rocks. Butbif you were to zoom out and accelerate time， it would be hard not to describe it as alive.

And i believe that would go for the universe as well.

Unfortunately，being scientists， humans are often limited to their own box of understanding.

Extremophiles for example has been a great breaking point for ehat we thought life ought to be. We thought that all life required oxygen. Well thats false， some life are found near underwater sulfure vents and they live thanks to sulphur not oxygen.

Also，life doesnt have to sustain itself or be able to reproduce. Look at a liger (mix between a lion and tiger). They are well alive and cannot have offspring. That example is seen in many other “living things”.

Lastly and this is my biggest question:
If life did not exist before it existed，did life originate from the non-living? Is that possible?

Answer is: everything must be alive. :)

If you talk about "life" in a biological way, then tech can't be alive per se.

If you talk about "life" meaning a sapient being, then a true AI fulfills it's very meaning.
However, there is no true AI, and we are light-years away of creating one.
None of todays artificial intelligences are worth the acronym "AI". Therefore I like to refer to them as "VI" - Virtual Intelligence.

Back to topic: Science has already "created" plenty of life. Keyword "Cloning" 😉

Oh dear... I confused "sapient" with "sentient"... Sorry for the confusion.

@irene A true AI learns on its own, is self aware, sentient, understands by concept, and passes the Turing test.

And only because 95% of population are morons who believe in everything that they see in press / tv / internet.

@irene You asked about "True AI", not "Intelligence".

The latter can be achieved through simple pattern matching, solving algorithms, expert systems and/or a variety of neural network designs.
And there are plenty of such virtual intelligences today.
Most prominent would be Alexa, GA and Siri.

Science has been creating life for a long time, see artificial impregnating, cloning, etc. While AI can be trained for specific tasks pretty well, it is still very far from the capabilities of the human brain.