So say we all

Was just reading up on the state of robotics technology and the latest biotech breakthroughs, and I was struck by a fascinating similarity. Humanity as a culture and as a species is on the cusp of something exhilaratingly terrifying, and as far as we know, unique in the history of the everything.

Robots have been around for a long time now and artificial intelligence has been imagined for far longer than it actually has seemed achievable. People have been heralding the imminent arrival of robotics and AI for some time now, but with the emergence of software and hardware capable of performing tasks once the sole domain of Homo sapiens, it seems certain that within the next 40 years there will exist human-level machine intelligence.

On the biological front, there's news this week that scientists have built from scratch a synthetic chromosome containing all the genetic material needed to produce a primitive bacterium. We're not talking about simply moving bits about from existing cells, but actually piecing together something new that has all the necessary bits to reproduce on its own once they surround it by cell.

So here's the thing...
No evidence to the contrary, life has only emerged once. Every single cell in each of our bodies -- like every living, dividing cell in every plant, animal, fungus, and bacteria -- can be traced backwards in a direct and unbroken line to the very first cell to split in two and start reproducing. Yet within a few years we will be witness to the start of an entirely new, man-made life form that will reproduce on its own and be the first link in a whole new chain -- something unprecedented and original under the sun with no ancestry save human ingenuity.

"Man-made" in this case is something of a misnomer, of course, because this feat is only possible using machines that can compute and assemble the most complex molecules ever created from scratch. As far as we know, we're the only intelligence to have ever evolved. But it's not a far leap for machines to become the second great intelligence to arise on Earth. Almost certainly within our lifetimes, something else new and unprecedented under the sun will be capable, perhaps, of pondering its own creation and creators.

Whether or not this ends badly in either case remains to be seen.