Are the robots we create alive?
This is the thread's initial revision.
I was recently pondering what it means to be a living thing, and then I thought about Robocode robots. Think about it, they react to their environment, they make decisions based on what they've learned, they compete with each other for survival, and some bots with genetic programming even reproduce in a way. Bots with neural networks are literally modeled after the human brain!
Is it really that much of a stretch to say that bots like Gaff or Engineer are as or more alive than a common worm, with ~300 neurons? Or at least say that if a single-celled bacterium can be considered a living being, so can a program that makes hundreds of complex calculations and decisions every second?
While we are talking about living machines, do you believe in the technological singularity? If so, when do you think it will happen?
