Toward Silicon-Based Superintelligent Life: From AI Agents and Robots to Artificial Organisms

Abstract

Artificial intelligence is moving from passive prediction to persistent agents that perceive, remember, plan, use tools, conduct experiments, and control robots. We ask whether the convergence of AI agents, artificial life, and robotics offers a credible route toward silicon-based superintelligent life. Here, silicon-based refers to engineered computational substrates, including chips, models, code, memory, networks, sensors, actuators, energy systems, and software or robotic bodies, rather than speculative silicon biochemistry. This Review and Perspective develops a multidisciplinary, testable framework from biology, cybernetics, information science, artificial life, robotics, cognitive science, ecology, social science, and philosophy. It defines ten operational dimensions: resource throughput and self-maintenance; homeostasis and repair; boundary, embodiment, and identity; memory and organizational continuity; reproduction or regeneration; variation, selection, and open ended evolution; agency and self-models; general cognition and long-horizon planning; sociality, ecology, and cumulative culture; and scalable superintelligence. We review AI-agent, digital-life, and robotics research against these dimensions. Current systems demonstrate many component functions, including feedback control, perception–action loops, persistent memory, transferable robot policies, self-model-based recovery, modular growth, replication subskills, evolutionary search, multi agent convention formation, and automated scientific discovery. Digital organisms satisfy narrower evolutionary definitions of artificial life, but no reviewed foundation-model agent or robot integrates viability, identity, and cognition into one self-maintaining individual or couples that individuality to a reconstructive, evolving lineage. We identify organizational closure as the missing principle: bodily, informational, regulatory, and resource processes must recursively maintain one another within the same continuing individual. If such closure preserves the speed, copyability, parallelism, shared memory, multi-embodiment, tool use, and automated discovery of modern AI, artificial organisms may be predisposed toward superintelligence. This is a conditional and falsifiable trajectory, not evidence that present systems are alive or broadly superintelligent.

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