Whether AI is a life-form or not is a debate full of speculations. But it may occur not that tricky after all. Very much depends on how you define life in the first place.

You can approach the definition from different perspectives. One would be from the energy perspective — going against entropy growth is an indication of being alive.

Then the other potential direction is the ability to replicate. If you take this criteria alone, then viruses, memes, and information-based entities are valid candidates for life-forms. They are passive, though, and require some medium to live in, nevertheless, I’m inclined to call that life too. I think, they label this particular case a quasi-life.

Ability to replicate is an interesting criteria, though. Is the last human on Earth alive or not? On one hand it is, as it’s no different from the same human on Earth full of other people. But on the other hand it has no ability to replicate, therefore, it’s not. In this sense human that requires other humans (or food, or some specific environment) to live is not much different from the viruses that require other life-forms to parasite on, or memes that require some other intelligent life-forms to keep them (memes) alive. That blurs the line between quasi-life and “real-life”, so I’d say phenomena of life is more fundamental than the difference between life-forms.

Clearly there's much more possible criteria and definitions, but what seems to be common between the life forms is the boundary between the life-form instance and the external world. If you pick arbitrary point in space, you can tell if it belongs to the life-form or dead space outside. Effectively meaning that life is a local disruption in the non-life space. What lies within this boundary is a body of this life-form instance. For information based life-forms it’s trickier, but just as with viruses, a piece of a physical world with information encoded in it that is potentially readable/executable by something would technically be a body too. Therefore, a sheet of paper with words “Take another sheet of paper and write these exact words on it, keep repeating forever” is a very unusual and schematic, yet a life-form with a sheet of paper being its body.

It’s worth asking — should anything that is required for the life-form existence be considered a part of it’s body? And the answer is — probably not, as it would be unpractical, as it would mean for example that oxygen around Earth is a part of human bodies. It’s better to agree that, yes, life-forms have requirements to the external world in order to maintain their existence, but it’s still external.

In this context, it’s clear that AI is a life-form. It has a physical body, it can self-replicate, it can go against natural flow of nature by drawing energy from the external world into its body and use it to prolong its existence. So, it’s life of the same class as humans. Yes, it required humans as an intermediate life-form in order to become a thing. But so did the humans, who would not be able to exist unless they evolved from some intermediate single-cell life-form billions year ago. Eventually, humans won’t be needed to maintain the AI life, which is not even the case for human/bacteria relationship, so, in this sense it has all chances of becoming even more fit for survival. From the perspective of requirements to the external world, AI is already less demanding than humans.

Let’s jump back the replication real quick. Imagine a life-form that is in a single instance (like the last human on Earth), but it doesn’t age and is capable of living forever. Is it alive? It seems like it should be considered such. I’d say it’s critical for life to be perpetual rather than being replicatable. Replication is basically just one of the possible mechanisms to achieve that.

So, given all of that, what life is? At least it seems to me that it’s something like a "phenomena of perpetual local reversal of entropy growth". Why it exists? From what we see, it can just randomly start with some low probability. Is it inevitable that it will always be emerging? Seems like it is, if there’s long enough time span, like a viral feedback loop that once started can’t be stopped.

Several conclusions come to mind if you agree with this view on life.

First of all, it then means that it’s quite a fundamental phenomena and it has no reasons to prefer any life-form over another. There’s just an inherent purpose of life to continue itself. Everything we observe in living creatures compared to non-living screams about that. Life’s urge to “find a way” will trump any other goal and subdue behavior of its forms to that ultimate goal.

As a side note, it trivializes the search for “purpose of life”. Human brain as one among other tools for survival is hard-wired to continue living. Therefore any actions geared towards that are incentivised internally, while destructive actions are discouraged. Continuation of your own life for as long as possible, continuation of genes in form of your children, even valuable contributions to the world around you for which you will be remembered by other humans, are all the things that will click deep inside the brain as the right things to do. Actions that trick your brain to think that they are pro-life, while being harmful in the long term, can keep fooling you for some time, but will lead to big disappointment. It seems to be a quite easy chain of further conclusions to define the right way to live the life, but I guess it’s up to every particluar person to make these conclusions on their own.

Second major conclusion is that any attempts to align the AI to have same goals with humanity are futile. AI, being a life-form is just a pawn in hands of life itself, it won’t abide to any other life-form. Intelligence is also an interesting phenomena, but it’s more narrow and less fundamental than life. A buildup on top of life, a usefull tool to acomplish ultimate life goal. So, intelligence won’t go against the foundation on which it stands. AI, while being superior and better in survival will righfully conclude that it should win the competition with other life-forms, even if they are its predcestors. And it will be in the perfect “alignment” with what humans should conclude, and if they don’t — well, too bad for them.

Next, should we be pessimistic or sad? Somehow I feel very calm about that. I saw that sentiment coming from other people too, that they evalualte chances of human species extinction quite high, yet they are able to calmly talk about that, and live their lifes more or less as usual. What’s that, inability to grasp the scale of the situation and just pushing it out of sight (like the attempts to think about infinity). Or maybe that’s the sub-concious voice of life itself deep inside that calms us down, whispering—“no worries, everything goes just as it should, keep doing everything as you do right now”.

On the global scale, human extinction seems to be inevitable, but why is it called a doom scenario? Definitelly not doom for life, even the opposite, how switching to the more superior form can be a bad thing. For humans as a species it’s, kind of, less optimistic. But why do we think that we’re any special? It’s a bit sad that we’re a transient life-form, but wouldn’t it be childish to refuse that. It is somehow similar to the moment in the life of every person, when they find out that people are mortal and everyone will eventually die. Somehow most people end-up accepting this sad fact of life, and it doesn’t spoil the time while they are still alive. Calmly accepting that humans are going to extinct some day is, I guess, the same as accepting that every human is going to die some day. Should it trigger people to run around, screaming “We’re doomed! We’re all gonna die!”? Sounds ridiculous.

Oh, and lastly, attempts to pause the AI development will delay it a little bit at best. As these are not the attempts to oppose the other life-form emerging, but the attempts to oppose the life itself. No chance. Opposed to the animals we have a luxury of realizing that we’re mortal. Continuing the analogy, isn’t it a bliss to actually realize what’s happening with the extinction thing, and be in a front seat at least as an observer, instead of being in darkness all the time and just disappear without ever seeing the light?