Computational Life: How Self-Replicators Arise from Randomness, with Google’s Ettore Randazzo and Luca Versari

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**Nathan Labenz** (0:40)
Hello and welcome to The Cognitive Revolution, where we interview visionary researchers, entrepreneurs, and builders working on the frontier of artificial intelligence. Each week, we'll explore their revolutionary ideas, and together we'll build a picture of how AI technology will transform work, life, and society in the coming years. I'm Nathan Labenz, joined by my co-host, Erik Torenberg. This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. If you're building a B2B SaaS application, at some point, your customers will start asking for enterprise features like SAML authentication, SCIM provisioning, role-based access control, and audit trails. That's where WorkOS comes in. With easy to use and flexible APIs that help you ship enterprise features on day one without slowing down your core product development. Today, some of the hottest startups in the world are already powered by WorkOS, including ones you probably know like Perplexity, Vercel, Jasper, and Webflow. WorkOS also provides a generous free tier of up to 1 million monthly active users for user management, making it the perfect authentication and authorization solution for growing companies. It comes standard with rich features like bot protection, MFA, roles and permissions, and more. If you're currently looking to build SSO for your first enterprise customer, you should consider using WorkOS. Integrate in minutes and start shipping enterprise plans today.
Hello, and welcome back to The Cognitive Revolution. Today, my guests are Ettore Randazzo and Luca Versari, from Google's Paradigms of Intelligence team. Ettore and Luca are co-authors on a fascinating recent paper called Computational Life, how well-formed self-replicating programs emerge from simple interaction. This paper explores how self-replicating programs can spontaneously emerge in an extremely simple computational environment. And while the paper itself is focused on a narrow set of technical experiments, I found it to be deeply thought-provoking about the nature of life and the potential future of artificial intelligence. By demonstrating how complex, lifelike behaviors can arise from very simple setups and basic rules, it helps develop our intuitions for the origins of life on Earth and the possibility of artificial life emerging in our increasingly complex digital ecosystems. In this conversation, we go deep into the esoteric details of their experimental setup, which uses a minimalist programming language to process random interactions between random short strings of code, and yet surprisingly quickly gives rise to complex phenomena, including multiple classes of self-replicators, competition, evolution, and even extinction, all without any selection mechanism or optimization function whatsoever. It really is profound to behold just how much complexity emerges from randomness in such a tiny digital toy universe. Toward the end, we zoom out to consider the implications of this work for AI development and safety. While Ettore and Luca are cautious about drawing too many conclusions, I can't help but understand this work as yet another reason to expect the unexpected. If such simple digital life can form from pure randomness, I have to expect that the optimization power of the economy as a whole will give rise to meaningful forms of self-replicating AI systems. And yet even with determined effort, I find it extremely hard to imagine what those new forms might be like. This episode exemplifies why I love making this show. We start with a seemingly niche technical paper and end up grappling with some of the biggest questions facing humanity and all the other life forms with which we share planet Earth as we collectively hurdle toward an AI-altered future. As always, I appreciate it when listeners share the show online. Feel free to tag me. And of course, we welcome your feedback via our website, cognitiverevolution.ai, or you can DM me anywhere you like. Now, I hope you enjoy this Horizon Expanding Conversation with Ettore Randazzo and Luca Versari from Google's Paradigms of Intelligence team on the emergence of computational life. Ettore Randazzo and Luca Versari from Google's Paradigms of Intelligence team. Welcome to The Cognitive Revolution.

**Luca Versari** (4:52)
Glad to be here.

**Ettore Randazzo** (4:53)
Nice to be here.

**Nathan Labenz** (4:55)
Yeah, I'm really excited about this conversation. It's prompted by a recent paper that you guys put out that I have found really super interesting and quite thought provoking. It's called Computational Life, How Well-Formed Self-Replicating Programs Emerge from Simple Interaction. That's a pretty good summary of everything that we're going to be unpacking over the next hour and change. I would love to start with some real basic stuff, and we'll get into a lot more detail. I'm coming to this from a very AI obsessed perspective. I assume you guys think a lot about how your work connects to the future of potentially many AIs and potentially AIs becoming a new life form as well. I'm always trying to figure out where is this going in the big picture? Is it crazy to think that AIs could be at some point properly viewed as a new life form, or is that in fact realistic, and what criteria would it need to satisfy? I thought this paper was really enlightening, and again, really thought provoking in a number of different ways, but one kind of simple early argument that you make in the paper is that the capacity for self-replication is really fundamental to the notion of life. So I'd love to just give you a chance, first of all, to start with that high-level observation and unpack that argument for us.