Historical Context

Overview

Humanity has been recreating the dynamics of life in artificial forms since before we were really humans: cave paintings, life-like sculptures, clockwork automata, and more. Today, we’ll do a very quick tour of this history as an introduction to the broad areas and mindset of the field.

AI Policy

As a reminder, you are not allowed to use genAI to summarize or produce your reading check responses. These checks are for you to engage with the material and start thinking about things before class. It’s okay if you don’t understand everything ahead of time!

Basic Learning Objectives

Before class, you should be able to:

• List and explain the generally agreed upon dynamics/requirements for life
• Explain the high-level idea of autopoiesis

Advanced Learning Objectives

After class, you should be able to:

• Identify historical examples of artificial life systems
• Explain how the artificial life mindset has appeared throughout history
• Connect historical artificial life examples to modern innovations

Resources

To achieve the basic learning objectives, read the following:

• Biological Bits Section 1.1
• ALife Expo Zone 2: Where Do You Draw the Line? - Note, you don’t have to fill in the Google form, but you can if you want; you’ll answer some of the same questions for the check on Moodle.

Checks

Submit answers to the following through Moodle:

• Rate the following on a scale of 1 (definitely non-living) to 7 (definitely living)
  • Fire
  • Mushroom
  • Humanoid Robot
  • Snowflake
  • Virus
  • Tamagotchi
  • Tornado
  • Volcano
  • Bacterium
  • Tree
  • Large Language Models
  • Planet Earth
• Pick one or two of the previous and explain your rating based on the dynamics of life