The Confluence of Natural and Artificial Intelligence - The Debrief

Why did natural processes on Earth lead to the creation of biological entities with natural intelligence, rather than computer systems with artificial intelligence (AI)? Even though silicon is the eighth most abundant element in the Solar system, waiting for a silicon chip to be made by a random sequence of chemical or geological processes would be equivalent to expecting a cat who happens to be walking on a keyboard to type a literary masterpiece. There is no conceivable random path that would lead to self-replicating computers out of the soup of chemicals on the early Earth. However, as I reviewed in an extensive textbook titled Life in the Cosmos, published in 2021 with my former postdoc, Manasvi Lingam, there is a reasonable path to explaining biology from the same initial conditions. Starting from the building blocks of silicon chips, computer designers and programmers accomplish complex abstract tasks.