![]() Rather, they occupy an ontological niche somewhere “at the edge of life”. Like AI or robots, viruses, lacking a number of key characteristics widely considered necessary criteria of life (cellular structure, metabolism, etc.), technically are not ‘alive’. A look at an all too familiar ‘fringe life form’ may illustrate this point: There has been an ongoing controversy on whether or not viruses are alive for some decades now (with a slight inclination towards the negative). This terminological shift, however, conceals the fact that there is no consensus on what the central designator of the term actually means: life. For some years now, it has become common to refer to any branch of research in the natural and engineering sciences that deals with the structures and behaviour of living organisms as ‘life science’. ![]() A second problem is that the notion of life itself is less clear than it seems. We are entangled in co-constitutive social relationships with our environment all the time. From an ontological perspective, however, this is not a prerequisite for establishing functioning social relationships between the two. Can life actually be created from something inanimate? Or to put it differently: What are the preconditions for attributing ‘life’ to man-made artefacts, and how should ontology and anthropology deal with this blurring of once clear-cut categories? One major problem when addressing questions like these is that there is always a subtext suggesting not just an extension of the concept of life but also assuming an essential isomorphism in the ways of being of humans and intelligent robots. The question no longer seems to be whether it will one day be possible to breathe life into matter, but rather how we shall cope with it conceptually. ![]() Advances in science and engineering-specifically the construction of robots equipped with artificial intelligence-have brought us a good deal closer to making this fantasy a reality. ![]() Humankind’s ancient dream of creating life resonates throughout the myths and stories of many societies. Instead, we propose to include ‘matter’ and ideas into the sphere of the social as agents in their own right to form a relational ontology of multi-species assemblages (ROMA). Contrasting dualistic concepts of man and nature with a monistic approach, we show that traditional properties of life (agency, self-replication, etc.) may apply to artefacts and that, once we accept the idea that social relationships are ultimately open connections to matter of any kind, the seemingly strict boundaries between species and material spheres can no longer be sustained. We argue that intelligent robots meet virtually all criteria Western biology came up with to define ‘life’ and that it ultimately makes sense to recognize them as a new species that is part of our social universe. Drawing mainly from neo-animistic and perspectivist approaches in anthropology and science and technology studies, the paper explores the potential of new forms of interconnectedness and rhizomatic entanglements between humans and a world transcending the boundaries between species and material spheres. Robots equipped with artificial intelligence pose a huge challenge to traditional ontological differentiations between the spheres of the human and the non-human.
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