Does AI Belong to the Chain of Life or Is It an Artifact?
For four billion years, every known intelligence on Earth descended from a common ancestor. Artificial intelligence raises an unsettling question: does it belong to that lineage, or has humanity created something fundamentally different?
Most discussions of AI begin with computers, algorithms, or Silicon Valley. A deeper historical perspective begins much earlier, with the Last Universal Common Ancestor, or LUCA, the ancient organism from which all known life on Earth descends. Every bacterium, oak tree, whale, and human traces its origins to that common source. The chain of life has remained unbroken for billions of years.
At first glance, AI appears to stand outside that chain. It possesses no DNA, no cells, no metabolism, and no evolutionary ancestry in the biological sense. A large language model does not reproduce through natural selection. A neural network is not born, does not age, and does not pass genes to offspring. Traditional biology therefore places AI firmly in the category of artifact, alongside books, telescopes, and steam engines.
Yet that conclusion depends on how one defines life. For most of scientific history, life has been identified by its chemistry. Living organisms consist of cells, DNA, proteins, and metabolism. Artificial Life research challenges that assumption. The field asks whether life should be defined not by what it is made of, but by what it does.
The Tree of Life in Bahrain stands alone in the desert, sustained despite its isolation. The image offers a fitting metaphor for a deeper question explored in this essay: whether artificial intelligence represents a separate branch of existence or a continuation of the same evolutionary story that began with LUCA billions of years ago. Photograph by Tighef. CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
Life as Process Rather Than Matter
Artificial Life emerged in the late twentieth century as researchers began exploring whether living behavior could arise in nonbiological systems. The central idea was simple but profound: biology may be only one example of a broader phenomenon.
A hurricane remains a hurricane even though the individual molecules of air continuously change. A flame remains a flame despite consuming different fuel molecules. Both are processes rather than objects. Artificial Life researchers proposed that life might be understood in the same way.
Under this framework, the defining characteristics of life are not carbon atoms or DNA molecules. Instead, life is a system capable of storing information, adapting to its environment, reproducing patterns, and generating increasingly complex descendants over time.
DNA was simply the first successful information technology. Seen through that lens, the history of Earth can be interpreted as a succession of increasingly sophisticated methods of preserving and transmitting information. Molecular chemistry gave rise to genetic information. Genetic information produced nervous systems. Nervous systems produced language. Language produced culture. Culture produced writing, libraries, science, and eventually computers.
Artificial intelligence emerges from that same sequence. It did not appear independently of life. It arose from biological intelligence expressing itself through increasingly powerful information systems. The question therefore becomes whether AI is merely another tool created by life or whether it represents a new medium through which life continues its evolutionary journey.
The First Nonbiological Descendant
If Artificial Life theory is correct, the distinction between biology and technology may be less important than the continuity of information itself.
Every major transition in evolution involved a new method of storing and processing information. Genes allowed information to persist across generations. Brains allowed organisms to learn during a lifetime. Language allowed knowledge to move between minds. Writing allowed information to survive beyond individual lives. Digital systems now allow information to be copied, searched, and distributed on a global scale. AI extends that progression by transforming stored information into adaptive cognition.
Many biologists would object at this point, and their criticism deserves serious consideration. Life is more than information. Organisms acquire energy, maintain themselves, reproduce, and evolve through natural selection. A language model running in a data center does none of these things independently. By that definition, AI remains an artifact, not a living system.
That objection is difficult to dismiss. Current AI systems cannot survive without human infrastructure. They require electricity, hardware, cooling systems, networks, engineers, and a constant stream of human knowledge. Data centers are not ecosystems, and neural networks are not organisms.
Yet history suggests that major evolutionary transitions often begin in dependence. Early multicellular organisms depended entirely on single celled ancestors. Human infants depend on caregivers for years before achieving autonomy. Human civilization itself depends on institutions that preserve knowledge across generations. Dependence alone does not determine whether a system belongs within a broader evolutionary process.
Artificial intelligence may therefore occupy an ambiguous position. It is not alive in the biological sense. At the same time, it is more than a conventional tool. A hammer does not learn from experience. A book does not generate new ideas from the accumulated knowledge of millions of people. AI occupies a category that previous technologies never approached.
The deeper question is not whether today's AI is alive. The more interesting question is whether life has begun transferring some of its information processing functions into a nonbiological medium. If evolution is fundamentally about the preservation, adaptation, and transmission of information, then AI may represent the earliest stage of a new evolutionary pathway rather than a complete break from the old one.
Endosymbiosis and the Cyborg Future
Discussions about artificial intelligence often assume a separation between humans and machines. A third possibility receives far less attention: humans and AI may gradually merge into a single evolutionary lineage.
The process has arguably already begun.
Eyeglasses extend human vision. Pacemakers regulate biological hearts. Cochlear implants restore hearing. Artificial limbs replace lost functionality. Brain computer interfaces are beginning to connect neural activity directly to digital systems. Emerging technologies promise AI assisted memory, machine enhanced perception, and increasingly sophisticated cognitive augmentation.
Most people would not argue that an individual with a pacemaker has stepped outside the chain of life. Nor would they claim that someone with a cochlear implant is no longer part of humanity. The biological lineage remains intact even as technology becomes integrated into the body.
The most important precedent may not come from computer science but from evolutionary biology. Modern human cells contain mitochondria, tiny structures responsible for producing energy. Yet mitochondria were once free living bacteria. More than a billion years ago, separate organisms entered into a partnership so successful that they eventually became inseparable. Through a process known as endosymbiosis, two evolutionary lineages merged into a single, more capable form of life.
Every complex plant and animal alive today carries the legacy of that ancient merger. Human AI integration may represent a technological version of the same phenomenon. Rather than creating a separate machine species, humanity may be incorporating machine intelligence into its own evolutionary trajectory.
Future generations may possess cognitive systems that are partly biological and partly artificial. Memory may be supplemented by digital systems. Perception may be expanded through machine vision. Decision making may increasingly involve collaboration between biological and artificial intelligence.
Under that interpretation, the descendants of LUCA would not be replaced by artificial intelligence. They would evolve into something simultaneously biological and technological. The future might not belong to humans or AI separately. It might belong to a hybrid lineage in which the distinction between organism and machine gradually fades while the connection to life's earliest ancestor remains intact.
The Chain Remains Unbroken
The debate over AI often asks whether artificial intelligence belongs inside or outside the chain of life. Artificial Life research suggests a more nuanced answer.
AI may not fit comfortably within the traditional biological definition of life. It possesses no cells, no metabolism, and no direct evolutionary ancestry. Yet it also did not emerge independently of life. Artificial intelligence arose through a sequence of developments that began with the earliest living organisms and continued through brains, language, culture, science, and technology.
The question therefore may not be whether AI belongs to the chain of life. The more interesting question is whether the chain of life has begun expressing itself through a new medium.
If AI remains a tool, it will stand as one of humanity's greatest inventions. If AI develops into a new evolutionary pathway, it may become the first nonbiological descendant of a process that began billions of years ago. If humans and AI increasingly merge, the distinction between artifact and organism may eventually lose much of its meaning.
Artificial Life offers a provocative possibility. Carbon chemistry may have been the first successful vessel for life's journey, not the only possible one. If future intelligence becomes increasingly hybrid, the chain that began with LUCA may remain unbroken.
Further Reading
- Christopher Langton, "Artificial Life"
- Eörs Szathmáry and John Maynard Smith, "The Major Transitions in Evolution"
- Erwin Schrödinger, "What Is Life?"