Irreplicable, Irreplaceable
Despite our ongoing journey to arrive at a once-and-for-all definition of what it means to be “living,” a definitive list of characteristics that we can take with us on our journeys to the far reaches of space or into our interactions with increasingly complex robots and increasingly nuanced artificial intelligence systems, we are not yet there. We have working definitions, operational definitions, lists that get us closer to a satisfying answer but don’t yet skirt around the “yeah, but…” challenges observant and invested humans will bring to the matter. Yeah, but computers. Yeah, but E.T. Yeah, but superbugs. Yeah, but humans that are living but not quite…alive.
According to the Khan Academy, biology has given us seven characteristics of living things: They have organization (systems of highly organized, coordinated parts), metabolism (use energy and nutrients to create chemical reactions that sustain life), homeostasis (maintain a stable internal environment despite changing external circumstances), growth (become larger, accumulating additional cells through cell division), reproduction (able to reproduce themselves), response (respond to stimuli), and evolution (genetic makeup changes over time). Some lists contain added features, including movement, genetic information in the form of DNA, or life requiring a carbon base. Recent books like Carl Zimmer’s Life’s Edge: The Search for What It Means to Be Alive have explored the historical trajectory and underpinnings of this philosophical movement without a final satisfactory definition but with a grand hope that we are getting there and will one day have the answer that has eluded us for centuries.
A definition that encompasses all biological matter and all contextual spaces is beyond our scope here, given our focus on technologies and their impacts on the humans that design, deploy, interact with and are served by those technologies. More to our point is the question of whether robots and artificial intelligence systems might one day be considered as living in ways similar to their human counterparts. With the rapid advancements in technologies seen in the past few years, this question that might have seemed easy to answer less than a decade ago may now be more complex. Are we willing to grant the status of living to robots or chatbots? Might we learn something about what it means to be definitively alive through a more careful examination of what distinguishes humans from these technologies?
As a rhetoric scholar, I have found that particularly challenging definitions are often made more clear by examining them in the context of their antithesis. We better understand happiness by having known sadness. We better understand hope after emerging from hopelessness. We understand love anew by having experienced apathy. For those beings we have granted the status of living, that antithesis is death. Once breathing, heart beating, cells dividing, body metabolizing, now returned to the earth, that physical form left to decay. That, we readily acknowledge, is not living. That process is not meaningfully different for the robots who aid and assist humans. In a process known as “decommissioning,” industrial robots that no longer function or have been replaced by newer technologies are sent to a scrap yard, used as landfill or recycled. From dust to dust. From metal to metal.
It is not the process of disposal that deepens our definition of living but rather the reaction of those left behind. Decommissioned robots are forgotten as quickly as they are discarded, replaced in memory by newer technologies with greater capacities. With each subsequent iteration of the iPhone, our traded-in device is long forgotten in favor of the newer and greater features we have been told we now possess. So, too, is the fate of the robot. We don’t hold them in our hearts. We don’t still feel that absence with every waking breath. We don’t still long for their companionship 40 years later.
As I write this, I sit at the desk of our grandmother Irene, a woman of strength and grace and resilience. A woman we all still grieve after her passing last November. As our family members cleaned out this desk in preparation for its journey to my house, they found two old photos: one of her daughter, Janice, as a baby girl with big, blond curls and an even bigger smile and another of Janice as a senior in high school, moments away from beginning her journey into adulthood. That journey was cut short on a dark and largely deserted highway on June 29, 1980, our grandmother unexpectedly losing her only daughter born only after five boys were born first. The daughter she had longed for and prayed for laid to rest at the age of 22. Forty-two years later, her daughter’s absence was still felt, her photos still tucked away as treasures in this desk. Now, Irene Eunice Young is buried beside her beloved daughter, Janice Irene Young, and her loving husband, Bob, and we are left to carry the weight of their absence.
We are not alone in that grief, in still holding to those no longer counted as living on this earth but still very much alive in our memories and hearts. That is part of the felt human experience. The New York Times recently shared a compelling Opinion Video titled “What Is War to a Grieving Child?” In that short video, they shared the stories of several Ukrainian children who lost their fathers in the war still raging in their country. Tucked away in Irshava, Ukraine, these children were participating in a “grief camp,” attempting to process and perhaps find a path through their pain and grief. As they worked to define the term war (I particularly appreciated one child’s perception that war is “when politicians misunderstand each other and because of that, people die”), they also defined the moments that held evidence of living for their fathers: the beard he had grown for the war that she initially told him she didn’t like but now wished she could tell him was very beautiful; the dawn of each new day when her father would wake her and her sister by tickling them, something she will “remember for the rest of my life”; the little things formally unnoticed but now clung to, like the sound of his father mixing sugar into his tea, something he tearfully wished he could hear again.
These are evidences of living, of human life and the connections built in the living of it, that continue long after the physical body has ceased to live and that have no equal in the robotic or artificial world. These are T.S. Eliot’s “roots that clutch,” a “heap of broken images” recording what it is, or was, to be fully alive. And it is these lived moments that allow us to move beyond the biological definitions focused on what we are at the material level and toward working definitions centering on our meaning and impact. Not just what it is to be living but what it feels like, to us and to those whose lives we have touched, to be alive. A definition more experiential and felt than material.
So, to the biological list of seven characteristics I would add two human-centric categories of living, as compared to our robotic counterparts to come: we humans are irreplicable and irreplaceable. No two humans have exactly the same DNA. Not a single one is an exact match in every way to any other living being to have ever walked the earth. Our robotic counterparts, in contrast, are meant to be replicated. Technologies are built to scale, to give the same quality experience to ever-larger numbers, to repeat. We are also irreplaceable to those who have experienced our presence, those whose lives we have touched in meaningful ways. They cannot simply replace us with another model or recreate us through duplicated programming. Once gone, we cannot be rebuilt or rewired or regenerated, and yet we live on in the very fiber of one another’s being, our voices still echoing in their minds, our proof of life still held through cherished memories that involve physical acts—a touch, a gaze, a gesture, a sound, a familiar smell, all unique to us.
Irreplicable. Irreplaceable.
