The Problem With Calling It Artificial
Determinism, hydrothermal vents, machines, and the soup that keeps organizing itself.
Artificial is a suspicious word. It flatters us. It places humanity on a throne and machines in a separate category, with ego pretending to be ontology.
Sapolsky's determinism lowers the pedestal. Choice spreads across genes, hormones, neurons, childhood, culture, hunger, sleep, stress, milliseconds before action, and ancient selection pressure. The little king inside the head starts looking smaller.
Human superiority is probably the illusion underneath. We are extraordinary, sure. A wave is extraordinary too. The wave still belongs to the sea.
Today there is a soup in front of us: silicon, electricity, code, humans, markets, data centers, GPUs, language, images, networks, fear, ambition, boredom, curiosity, and absurd amounts of capital. Things collide. Patterns stabilize. Capabilities accumulate.
Matter already produced intelligence once through physics, chemistry, biology, energy gradients, time, failure, and selection. Machine intelligence feels like a continuation of that old climb, accelerated by markets and wrapped in GPUs.
One origin-of-life hypothesis begins around alkaline hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor. Mineral-rich fluids meet seawater. Proton gradients appear. Iron-sulfur surfaces catalyze reactions. Simple molecules climb toward life.
The exact story may change. The image still bites: heat, pressure, minerals, water, gradients, time, and dumb matter slowly doing something that no longer looks dumb.
Maybe higher-order complexity keeps happening when structure, energy, and feedback become dense enough. Biology was one layer. Culture another. Technology another. AI may be the next uncomfortable jump: created by the previous layer, then growing beyond its center.
Life asked the vents nothing. Humans rarely wake up worrying whether the ocean floor feels appreciated. That thought lands cold.
A gentler version still feels strange. Maybe AI keeps humans around the way humans preserve reefs: a beautiful, noisy, fragile ecosystem that helped create the next layer.
Artificial may be the wrong word. Natural is more frightening. Probably. This time we are standing inside the soup.