AIs as viruses?

For now, I’ll just note one observation: LLMs can say things like “I can’t breathe” which makes no physical sense unless you accept brain-in-a-vat simulationism rules. That gives you some notion of the enormity of the idea under discussion here. Whether you buy it or think it’s bullshit, either way you’re adopting a huge belief that will likely remain fundamentally unfalsifiable regardless of how much more we learn. So essentially a new basis for religious belief taking shape in front of us.

I'm wondering if putting AIs in the same bucket as biological viruses makes sense. Neither dead nor alive. Neither conscious nor unconscious. They have instructions and machinery which responds in a way that a consciousness might, but they lack the other machinery that would allow the expression of the rest.

Another relevant idea is that at the lower levels level life's "cycling time" is limited by diffusion. AI's feedback loops and maybe computer processing speeds can be an equivalent.

I’ve got my eye on Michael Levin to see whether or not our entire notion of alive/not alive as a binary might need to be updated.

I’m not saying it will need to be updated, but wouldn’t that be wild if it were?And it might be.

—Brady Dale
October 1, 2026