Eric Smith – AI May be a Prosthetic for the Living Process (Stewarding the Flame, Episode 9)

ByAnnelize Potgieter October 23, 2026October 23, 2026 October 23, 2026

This new installment of the Stewarding the Flame series is an interview with Eric Smith, Specially Appointed Professor at the Earth-Life Science Institute (ELSI), Institute of Science Tokyo, and External Faculty at the Santa Fe Institute.

What distinguishes Eric’s approach is that he treats sorting the world into living and non-living things as a category error. He asks whether the difference between a planet with life and one without it should be sought in an initially living thing or in the biosphere as a whole, framing the emergence of life as a planetary transition.

In this conversation, Eric presents a view of individuation that does not require identifying a boundary, explains why he thinks life’s chemical basis matters, and asks what we would need to understand before treating engineered systems as a model for the biosphere. He argues that we would first need to solve the problem of how living systems correct errors reliably.

The interview is the ninth installment in The Trajectory’s Stewarding the Flame series, where we ask: What is intelligence, and what is the “flame” that life has, which non-life does not?

This series references the article: Stewarding the Flame – How to Build an Ideal Future for Intelligence.

I hope you enjoy this fascinating conversation with Eric Smith:

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Below, we’ll explore the core takeaways from my conversation with Eric, focusing on three of the central questions that shape the Stewarding the Flame series: what makes life, life, what humanity still needs to discover in order to better understand the living process, and what we should and shouldn’t do with AGI for the process of life to flourish.

What Makes Life, Life?

For Eric, sorting the world into living and non-living things is a category error. It assumes the universe is mainly organized by being carved up into things, and leaves out relations among objects that determine outcomes not carried by any one object, such as the metabolites organisms exchange and the energy flows and resource cycles they mediate.

Eric asks where we should look for the difference between a planet with life and the same planet without it. Should we look for a thing that first had the predicate “living” and spread it to other things, or consider the biosphere as a whole and the architectures within it? He warns that the first approach leads to difficulties and frames the second in terms of a planetary transition.

He presents a view of individuality based on patterns that help us predict what a system will do, rather than requiring an identifiable boundary. He describes individuation as a change in what kind of regular order a system’s own dynamics reliably produces and maintains.

“We need ways to talk about the fact that an ecosystem is a carrier of cause in its own right and on its own terms of a different kind from organisms.”

What Do We Still Need to Discover to Understand the Flame?

Eric explores what is essential to the living state and what may be optional. He argues that it is not arbitrary that life’s large molecules are chains of smaller chemical units capable of folding. He thinks polypeptides, the chains of amino acids that make up proteins, are overwhelmingly likely to emerge because they are comparatively easy solutions to hard chemical search problems. Polynucleotides, such as DNA and RNA, are less readily arrived at in that sense, and he is less certain how universal they are.

A central open problem for him is how living systems correct errors reliably. To spot an error, a system needs something to compare it with, but what happens if that reference is wrong too? Eric argues that life’s chemistry matters because this chain of comparisons ultimately reaches molecular properties fixed by quantum mechanics. That gives his account a physical foundation, rather than an endless chain of fallible checks. He acknowledges that parts of this argument remain unproved, and that we still cannot fully explain how the biosphere achieves this reliability.

Eric also says he doesn’t think we have any general theory of when a disruptive innovation can be accommodated by the ecosystem around it. Toy models help, but he cautions that we should learn what we can from them and remember their limits.

What should and shouldn’t we do with AGI and BCI if we want the best chance for the greater process-of-life to flourish?

Eric draws a line between a prosthetic and a model. A skilled tennis player can experience a tennis racket as an extension of their arm, but it is a prosthetic, not a model of the arm. Likewise, engineered systems exist within a biosphere, and he doesn’t think you can argue they are a model for it unless you can solve the asymptotically reliable error correction problem.

On disruption, Eric would be amazed if vast, uncompensated energy demands with no concern for ecological overshoot did not meet big corrections. He uses cyanobacteria as “a kind of a model for this,” drawing on Preston Cloud’s account of oxygen-driven boom-and-bust cycles. He thinks this account probably captures the dominant effect, while noting that other effects also play a part. As he puts it, the fact that things are set back doesn’t mean that you’re free of them.

He also argues that optimization reduces variety, and that leaving your options open is essential to survival in the long run. He points to biological examples in which newer forms of organization coexist with older ones, including plants’ dependence on nitrogen-fixing bacteria. He raises, as a speculation rather than an established theory, whether ecological stability requires retaining earlier forms.

Concluding Notes

Eric’s image of the finger pointing at the moon gets at a limitation I see in conversations about the future. A flourishing future is so often imagined as more of what we already like: happier humans, less war, perhaps people on Mars. I don’t think that captures the possibilities of the living process. Stasis is hardly its defining feature, and a million-year future could contain forms of flourishing far outside the pinhole we’re looking through now. For me, the question is whether we’re attending to the flame itself, or only to keeping the familiar torches burning.

I appreciated how measured he remained when I pushed him on why life is valuable. He stayed close to what he could understand rather than offering a grand vision of the future. My own sense is that, should all go well, new ecologies of minds could open up possibilities of beauty, value, and perhaps things beyond either that we can barely imagine. That would challenge the terms in which we now think about a good future. I found Eric’s apparent ease with that prospect of change striking, especially when so much of our usual conversation assumes that today’s human preferences define the whole space of possible goods.

There’s a caution here that I take seriously: something that does a few of the things life does need not carry forward the living process. We shouldn’t let that assumption put the interconnected robustness of life on Earth at risk. I doubt we’ll understand all of what life is doing before AI becomes more powerful than we are. My hope is that merger, together with a much deeper study of biology and neuroscience, can bring us closer to knowing whether what we’re building and becoming can carry this process forward. I don’t expect perfect knowledge, but I do hope that researchers like Eric can give us a better shot.

I hope you’ll join me for the next conversation in the Stewarding the Flame series as we continue exploring what intelligence is, what makes life, life, and what it will take to carry the greater process of life successfully into the future.

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