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Joshua Bongard

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  • Living Things Are Not (20th Century) Machines: Updating Mechanism Metaphors in Light of the Modern Science of Machine Behavior2021ⓒ 99

    Bongard and Levin argue that the longstanding debate over whether living things are machines has been conducted against a 20th-century, static definition of 'machine' that modern engineering has already surpassed, making the debate largely obsolete. Seven classical properties routinely invoked to distinguish machines from life—independence, predictability, human design, linear modularity, cognitive absence, reductionist tractability, and clear hardware/software distinction—each fail when tested against contemporary systems: evolutionary algorithms have produced jet engines (Yu et al., 2019), metamaterials (Zhang et al., 2020), and computer-designed Xenopus-cell organisms (Kriegman et al., 2020) without direct human specification of outcomes; backpropagation-trained deep networks resist exactly the reductionist decomposition Nicholson (2019) listed as a necessary machine feature; and planarian flatworms harbor re-writable bioelectric voltage patterns in non-neural cells that function as latent morphogenetic memory editable without touching the genome (Durant et al., 2017). The framework the paper introduces is the multi-axis continuum of 'machine behavior'—a 2D option space spanning degree of design vs. evolution and degree of autonomy, applicable independently at each level of biological organization (cell, organism, swarm)—drawn from the emerging interdisciplinary field Rahwan et al. (2019) named 'machine behavior.' Bongard and Levin argue this implies that the correct response is not to abandon the machine metaphor but to update it: biology and computer science are branches of a single information science, sharp boundaries between evolved and designed systems will not persist, and a conceptual framework that treats agency, programmability, and autonomy as continuous variables across all substrates is both necessary and sufficient to guide synthetic bioengineering, regenerative medicine, and machine design in the coming decades.

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