Johnston, John, Morris Moscovitch, and Carlo Umiltà. The allure of machinic life: Cybernetics, artificial life, and the new AI . MIT Press, 2008.
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In the early era of cybernetics and information theory following the Second World War, two distinctively new types of machine appeared. The first, the computer, was initially associated with war and death—breaking secret codes and calculating artillery trajectories and the forces required to trigger atomic bombs. But the second type, a new kind of liminal machine, was associated with life, inasmuch as it exhibited many of the behaviors that characterize living entities—homeostasis, self-directed action, adaptability, and reproduction. Neither fully alive nor at all inanimate, these liminal machines exhibited what I call machinic life, mirroring in purposeful action the behavior associated with organic life while also suggesting an altogether di¤erent form of ‘‘life,’’ an ‘‘artificial’’ alternative, or parallel, not fully answerable to the ontological priority and sovereign prerogatives of the organic, biological realm. First produced under the aegis of cybernetics and proliferating in ALife research and contemporary robotics, the growing list of these machines would include John von Neumann’s self-reproducing automata, Claude Shannon’s maze-solving mouse, W. Ross Ashby’s self-organizing homeostat, W. Grey Walter’s artificial tortoises, the digital organisms that spawn and mutate in ALife virtual worlds, smart software agents, and many autonomous mobile robots. In strong theories of ALife these machines are understood not simply to simulate life but to realize it, by instantiating and actualizing its fundamental principles in another medium or material substrate.