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In the beginning, there was computation
Life is code, and code is life, in nature as it is in technology.
As maverick biologist Lynn Margulis discovered in the 1960s, eukaryotic cells are the result of such a symbiotic event, when the ancient bacteria that became our mitochondria were engulfed by another single-celled life form, related to today’s archaea. Modern AI, for instance, depends on both massive parallelism and randomness—as in the “stochastic gradient descent” algorithm, used for training most of today’s neural nets, and the “temperature” setting used in virtually all chatbots to introduce a degree of randomness into their output. The famous second law of thermodynamics tells us that, in a closed system, entropy will increase over time; that’s why, if you leave a shiny new push mower outside, its blades will gradually dull and oxidize, its paint will start to peel off, and in a few years, all that will be left is a high-entropy pile of rust.
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