Michael Levin

I've given this talk to some audiences and especially in the organicist community.

People like the first part where it's like, okay, now there's an idea for what the magic quote unquote is that's special about the living things and so on.

Now, if we could just stop there, we would have dumb machines that just do what the algorithm says, and we have these magical living interfaces that can be the recipient for these ingressions.

Cool, right?

We can cut up the world in this way.

Unfortunately, or fortunately, I think, that's not the case.

And I think that even simple, minimal computational models are, to some extent, beneficiaries of these free lunches.

I think that...

The theories we have, and this goes back to the thin client interface kind of idea, the theories we have of both of physics and computation, so theory of algorithms, you know, Turing machines, all that good stuff.

Those are all good theories of the front end interface.

and they're not complete theories of the whole thing.

They capture the front end, which is why they get surprised, which is why these things are surprising when they happen.

I think that when we see embryos of different species, we are pulling from well-trodden, familiar regions of that space, and we know what to expect, frog, snake, whatever.

When we make cyborgs and hybrids and biobots, we are pulling from new regions of that space that look a little weird and they're unexpected, but you know, we can still kind of get our mind around them.

When we start making AIs, like proper AIs,

we are now fishing in a region of that space that may never have had bodies before.

It may have never been embodied before.

And what we get from that is going to be extremely surprising.

And the final thing just to mention on that is that

because of this, because of the inputs from this platonic space, some of the really interesting things that artificial constructs can do are not because of the algorithm.