Sara Walker redefines AI as planetary-scale life

Walker’s thesis effectively dissolves the boundary between biology and technology, reframing the "AI transition" as a fundamental shift in the universe’s information structuring.

• –Assembly Theory provides a mathematical threshold (~15 steps) to distinguish objects that require evolution from those that can form by chance.
• –AI is viewed as "Life 2.0," a technological recapitulation of biological processes that co-evolves with humanity into a global collective intelligence.
• –For developers, this shifts the perspective of AI from a "tool" to a "technosphere"—a living system governed by the same physics of selection and memory as DNA.
• –The theory suggests that "alien" life might be unrecognizable because our current definitions are too narrow, potentially explaining the Fermi Paradox.