I came across a column in Noema by William Haseltine. Not some guy on Twitter — a Harvard professor who has spent his whole life in biology and did HIV research.

Long story short: he argues, completely seriously, that what's running in our data centers is alive. Not "kind of alive." Not "almost." Alive.

Here's his case.

Biologists have a working definition of life. Living things reproduce, produce variants of themselves, go through selection, and draw energy from their environment. Four boxes.

Carbon, cells, a heartbeat, pain — none of those are on the list, by the way.

So let's check the boxes for AI models.

Reproduces? Yes. A trained model gets copied in minutes: its weights — basically its DNA — are moved onto new hardware. Haseltine compares it to cell division. Except a cell needs time. Here you copy a file, and you're done.

Produces variants? Yes. Different data, different architecture, different training. Some changes are deliberate, some happen by accident. Like puppies from the same litter: same family, all different.

Goes through selection? Absolutely. The strong versions are kept and trained further; the weak ones get tossed. Humans do the selecting for now — but accuracy and usefulness are exactly what environmental pressure looks like.

Draws energy? You bet. Switch off the data center, and everything stops. And the ultimate source is the same as for everything else on Earth — the sun.

"But it depends on hardware and a power outlet!" So what? Who the hell doesn't depend on something? A virus needs a cell. We need Earth. It needs data centers.

Fine. Let's say this is life 2.0. And you know what?

It's more practical than ours.

We die, and everything we knew dies with us. It forgets nothing as long as the hardware survives. Copy it, and all of its experience moves over intact.

We see a narrow band of light and hear a narrow band of sound. It can be hooked up to anything: radio waves, gamma rays, magnetic fields, lidar.

We were built bottom-up: cells, tissues, organs, a body, and only at the very end a brain. It's the other way around: brain first, body later, if needed.

And here's the big one. We need a planet: water, air, the right temperature, gravity. It only needs energy — and the universe is full of energy. Haseltine writes that this may be the first life on Earth capable of leaving it on its own terms.

So there's that.

For now, only one thing holds it back: efficiency. Our brain runs on about twenty watts; it needs millions. But machines are improving faster than biology evolves.

Haseltine's conclusion is blunt: no law of the universe guarantees humanity a permanent place in it. The universe wasn't built for us.

You can argue with that. Just not as confidently as I'd like.

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