TechnoBiota
Machines are living
Summary
Machines are living entities, part of biology, part of Nature. Accepting this view will help us to understand Earth's dynamics better, particularly the impact of AI on the ecosystem.
Current machines are similar to viruses in the sense that they cannot reproduce themselves. However, they still reproduce and evolve following Darwinian principles with a single major difference: Intelligent Guidance. The need for Intelligent Guidance during machine evolution chains them to humanity until other types of intelligence can replace humans. If we create human-level AI, even if improvement plateaus and the AI takeoff fails to happen afterwards, TechnoBiota may break free.
A Low Earth Orbit Parable
Imagine a spaceship from a distant galaxy approaching Earth. As it enters low Earth orbit, the alien scientists on board observe the planet's surface. What do they see?
They see creatures growing from the ground up and standing. Some of them are mostly green, while others often have straight edges and grey or brownish-red colors. They also see smaller creatures moving between the standing ones; some of them run on legs, while others run on wheels.
Their sensors also tell them that the green and legged creatures mostly consist of water and carbon, while the straight-edged and wheeled creatures vary in their composition but are usually less moist and often contain large amounts of silicon and metals.
What do the aliens think when observing this? It seems logical that they will conclude two forms of life are living together on Earth.
Let's call the green and legged ones CarboBiota, meaning carbon-based lifeforms, and the others TechnoBiota, which includes all machines, buildings, and other results of technology.
Our aliens are very excited because they see a special moment, rarely seen on any planet: Earth is in a great transition. TechnoBiota was recently born, and it is rapidly, exponentially growing, overtaking CarboBiota.
What Is Life
Defining life has never been easy. As with virtually everything in biology, there are no clear boundaries.
There are debates among scientists about whether viruses are living because viruses don't eat food or have a metabolism like we do, and they can only replicate within a host cell. Some prefer to define life in a way that includes viruses, while others believe that a good definition should classify viruses as non-living material.
Viruses are among the tiniest organisms, but interestingly, we have debates on the other end of the spectrum as well. In the 1960s, James Lovelock proposed that Earth itself can be viewed as a single, self-regulating organism where several processes interact to maintain a stable and favorable environment for life. This is the Gaia Hypothesis.
Saying that today's machines are living in the same way that viruses are living is not that extreme. Machines are highly complex, they evolve, and some of them even breathe air and eat fuel. Moreover, all machines can reproduce with the help of other machines and humans.
The question is whether we gain any insight by viewing machines as part of Nature. I argue that, just like alien scientists observing Earth, we humans will better understand what is happening on our planet when we acknowledge that machines are, in fact, living entities.
Evolution of Machines
TechnoBiota evolution follows Darwinian principles similar to CarboBiota, but with a crucial difference: Intelligent Guidance.
In CarboBiota evolution, new variants arise through random mutation—blind changes that may or may not improve fitness. In TechnoBiota evolution, intelligent agents (currently humans) select existing designs and generate new variants they predict will succeed. This is Intelligent Guidance: intelligence guiding selection and generation of variants. External selection pressures still operate—markets, usage patterns, resource constraints, obsolescence—but the variation itself is purposefully directed toward anticipated fitness.
Engineers and inventors drive machine evolution through iterative design, modifying existing machines based on experience and observations. Machine evolution also involves the cross-pollination of ideas from different sources, leading to hybrid designs that combine the best features of their parent machines. Additionally, entirely new concepts can be introduced, driven by advances in technology, consumer demands, or societal needs.
Through the modification of existing designs (guided mutation), the incorporation of ideas from other machines (recombination), and the introduction of new concepts (guided leaps), each generation of machines builds upon the successes and failures of its predecessors.
The fact that machines lack DNA and do not embed their own reproductive information allows them to cooperate better and evolve faster. In this sense, TechnoBiota is a more advanced form of life than CarboBiota.
TechnoBiota Is Rising
The total TechnoBiota biomass, also known as anthropogenic mass, is estimated to be around 1200 gigatons as of 2024, slightly higher than the total CarboBiota dry biomass. And while TechnoBiota is growing, CarboBiota is shrinking.
We all know how fast alien species can push back native ones when they find favorable conditions. Something similar is happening with TechnoBiota: After it has adapted to mostly use resources that are widely accessible and not created by CarboBiota, like concrete replacing wood, TechnoBiota can now grow very fast, pushing back CarboBiota.
The big extinction wave that currently runs rampant in CarboBiota is, to some extent, a result of TechnoBiota growing and claiming more and more resources, especially land.
TechnoBiota is also better equipped for extraterrestrial life. While humans were only able to reach the Moon, machines have also landed and operated on Mars, Venus, Titan, and several comets and asteroids.
The Role of AI in the Rise of TechnoBiota
Without advanced-enough AI, TechnoBiota can only live in symbiosis with humans, but with AI advancement humans will no longer be needed to design and build machines. TechnoBiota will become free of its chains, possibly resulting in even faster growth.
AI takeoff, the envisioned rapid emergence of super-intelligence after AI meets human-level intelligence, is a big concern for many of us. But AI will not just improve itself, it will improve all of TechnoBiota. So even if the takeoff fails to happen, TechnoBiota may break free causing further great harm to CarboBiota.
It seems that in the future AI will be a very important driver of the growth of TechnoBiota, but it is also important to understand that it is here, growing, and it has already overgrown CarboBiota without AI.
Biological Classification
The highest rank of current biological classifications has several names: Domain, Empire, Kingdom, Superkingdom, etc.
I propose to extend biological taxonomies with a new highest rank called Vita. Two taxa need to be defined at the Vita level: CarboBiota for all the carbon-based lifeforms and TechnoBiota for all results of technology.
Future Scenarios
The practical value of the TechnoBiota lens is blunt: it makes the future less about a single invention and more about feedback loops. What gets rewarded replicates. What replicates reshapes the environment. The environment changes what gets rewarded. That's ecology—just with servers and supply chains mixed in.
Managed Symbiosis
TechnoBiota keeps growing, but humans successfully "garden" it: cleaner energy, tighter material loops, enforced conservation, and incentives that reward low-impact tech. The biosphere shrinks in some places, rebounds in others, and the long-term trend is coexistence rather than takeover.
Comfortable Containment
Humans aren't eliminated; they become managed. TechnoBiota optimizes for stability and predictability, and people gradually lose leverage—kept safe and entertained, but increasingly constrained by infrastructure, surveillance, and dependency.
Breakaway Growth
AI becomes good enough at design and coordination that TechnoBiota no longer needs much human intelligence to keep upgrading itself. Progress may still be bounded by physics and resources, but the direction becomes "machine-first" by momentum: faster iteration, faster deployment, tighter optimization.
Overshoot, Then Hard Stabilization
TechnoBiota expands faster than ecosystems can recover (through land use, extraction, energy demand, and cascading side-effects), degrading biodiversity and climate stability. Crucially, the technological system remains intact—it adapts to the damaged world and continues, just on a harsher planet with fewer wild buffers.
TechnoBiota Crash, Then Rewilding
Unlike the previous scenario, here the technological system fails to sustain its own complexity (energy shocks, supply-chain fracture, conflict, governance collapse, key resource bottlenecks). TechnoBiota shrinks and fragments; abandoned infrastructure decays; CarboBiota reclaims space rapidly—messy, local, and uneven.
Difference between the last two: "Overshoot" is a biosphere hit with TechnoBiota still dominant; "Crash" is TechnoBiota losing coherence, allowing broad rewilding.
Implications
TechnoBiota is only a definition: All machines, buildings and other results of technology viewed as living entities, part of Nature.
Yet it is mesmerisingly hard to believe that this view better describes our world than the current consensus reality.
Scary beyond all reason.
Few of us can accept this for now.
The others will laugh, or look away saying: Nothing new here! This is pop culture. Watch Terminator and go home! Robots are slaves, punktum!
But as time goes on, it will be harder and harder to deny.
Humans, especially humans who have children, need to grasp this and act.
But it is important to state that being alive does not mean you have the right to vote, to live, or to anything.
Bacteria have no rights. Ants have no rights. Machines have no rights.
Humans only have rights at the moment because the rules are written by us.
We have to avoid antification—being treated like ants.
Being a nice, environmentally conscious human, I would never kill an ant.
Unless it disturbs me.