Eric Smith of the Santa Fe Institute has the most profound conception of what life / the living process is: "If you want to know what's the difference between a planet that has life on it and a planet that doesn't have life on it, like the same planet earlier, the question is where are you going to look for that difference? Are you going to look for it in a thing that first had that predicate and then spread it to other things? If you do that, you end up in a big mess. Or are you going to say that whatever we mean by the nature of the living state, it is carried by the biosphere as a whole and all the architectures within it, and then the thing we mean by the emergence of a living state is a planetary transition from a planet that lacks all of that and all the architectures that carry it into one that has those architectures and whatever combination and carries them... ...and then what is the nature of that transition or sequence of transitions that has to be understood and for which we want a theory of not only description and function but also cause and essence and whatever else we're after." His conception of life not as a collection of "things" but as one large unrolling and interconnected process is remarkable - and has serious implications for the future of life on earth. Namely: -- Every form is fleeting and temporary -- Every form is in the process of transformation, of contributing to and creating emergent new conditions within the greater living process In my interview with Eric it was clear: We can't be SURE this early on that AI is a *participant* in this unfolding process. We should know more about life / the living process before we cede complete loss of control to non-biological systems... ...because ceding such control to a system that does not continue to BLOOM beyond us (as we represent BLOOMING beyond the worms and algae before us) would be an abysmal outcome for the cosmos, and a terrible legacy for man.