Stuart Kauffman has spent over 50 years asking a deceptively simple question: what actually makes something alive? His answer is that greater computational sophistication alone does not make AI alive. In this installment of the Stewarding the Flame series, the pioneering complexity theorist argues that life is fundamentally a matter of physical construction, not computation - living things build themselves out of real matter, while computers only move symbols around. We explore his conc...
