No principled limits to functionalization between living systems and inorganic machinery are known; hybrid functional systems can be constructed that are part living tissue and part smart electronics.

Entities in the same semantic neighborhood but without a typed relation to this one — candidates for new edges or unrecognized duplicates.

• Hybrid bioengineered systems blur distinctions between intelligent machines and conscious life.claim0.810
  Brain-machine interfaces and biological-electronic hybrids demonstrate no principled line between subjectivity and engineering.
• The advent of computers has made it possible, for the first time, to have mechanized procedures that are inherently flexible and context-sensitive, approximating organic living processes.claim0.790
  Offers a potential technological path out of rigid bureaucracy, enabling a new organic form of organization.
• Living configurations are hijackable in the good sense; manufactured systems are brittle to intervention.claim0.779
• Living cells and tissues are not really machines; but then again, nothing is really anything – all metaphors are wrong, but some are more useful than others.claim0.779
  Concluding pragmatic epistemology: the machine metaphor's value is heuristic, not ontological
• The complex nature of functional relationships between component parts begins to look less like the product of selection at the system level, and more like the source of evolutionary individuality.claim0.778
  Inverts the causal arrow: relationships produce individuality, not vice versa.
• Self-similarity and multi-scale competency currently remain a real feature that distinguishes living systems from machines, though there is no deep reason preventing engineered artifacts from exploiting it.claim0.776
  The one property the authors acknowledge still distinguishes life from machines, but frame as contingent not essential
• In nature the principle of unfolding wholeness creates living structure nearly all the time. Human designers, who are not constrained by this unfolding, can violate the wholeness if they wish to, and can therefore create non-living structure as often as they choose.quote0.775
  Encapsulates the distinction between natural and human-made order, central to Alexander's critique of contemporary architecture.
• Cognitive capacities evolve through continuity across natural, hybrid, and synthetic life forms using conserved bioelectric mechanismsclaim0.775