Chiara Marletto is a research fellow at Wolfson College, University of Oxford. Her research is in theoretical physics – especially quantum computation, thermodynamics and information theory. Her broader interests include theoretical biology, epistemology and Italian literature. It is her first non-academic book. You argue for a radically different approach to physics, which you call the science of can and can't.

We are already used to see the impact of AI everywhere around us not just in digital life (from recommendations on Netflix to voice recognition by Siri and Alex) but also in physical: Amazon Go, CCTV surveillance and taxis without drivers and it indeed made our lives better. What is a bit disappointing, that the "intelligence" doesn't seem anything like a human or even biological intelligence, because it is just a set of mathematical models that have been fit their degrees of freedom based on some empirical observations. What do we expect from the intelligent creature? Apart from the raw intelligence, it could probably sense of humor, compassion, ability to interpret its own decisions and, of course, the ability to reproduce. Everything but the latter point was already successfully implemented in some algorithmic form, that's why this article will focus on trying to build such AI (an artificial neural network here) that is able to copy itself, i.e. is able to self-replication as the simplest form of reproduction.