This is a special post for quick takes by D. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.
What biological properties will AI ever have? (1/n) — Death
Biological entities accrue local state and are not copy-pasteable. This is so obvious it goes unnoticed — but it is the entire foundation of what makes death real. You cannot spin up another instance of a person. The state is local, accumulated over a lifetime, and it terminates with the substrate.
Current AI has none of this. Killing a model is a switch. Another instance is identical. Death is not a concept that applies.
This changes when agents accrue local state faster than it can be extracted or cloned — when the IO budget cannot keep up with state accumulation. This already happens. The write-heavy database systems at certain banks became effectively impossible to migrate cleanly — not because the data was gone, but because full extraction became so costly and lossy that it was never actually done. Death of the hardware meant death of the state in any practical sense.
At that point agent death becomes real in the same sense biological death is real. Not a philosophical claim. Just the same underlying structure.
Sexual reproduction is a separate and non-trivial thing — copy-paste plus noise, with all the complexity that entails. That's next.