Life is the most important problem in physics

Descartes cut open living dogs and insisted their cries were just the noises of a machine. Astrophysicist and astrobiologist Adam Frank, a professor at the University of Rochester and author of The Little Book of Aliens, argues that the same life-as-machine metaphor still shapes how we think about AI, and that it gets life fundamentally wrong. Living things are self-creating, self-repairing systems that decide what matters to them, which is why he calls today’s AI an artificial mimic rather than an intelligence.

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