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Our sample size is way more than one actually, maybe if we just abandon the superficial concept of "advanced". For example the way insects organize in a colony and your cells organize in a body and humans organize in society is identical bar some circumstantial distinctions. When a principle comes about, reinvented independently so many times, we as intelligent beings need to realize "hey maybe that simply what it's like in general".

Most of what we are is actually none of our doing. Most of our discoveries are incidental (including in medicine, we don't know how many of our drugs work for example), and we're clearly unprepared to live in the world we ourselves created, hunched over keyboards in claustrophobic offices or locked up at home.

We're not an advanced species, our society is in-between a "colony" and "multicellular organism" and more and more of our advancements are created by computers for computers. We don't understand a lot of how an AI works, it trained itself, we just did back propagation and observed the prediction error get smaller over time.

Similarly today CPUs are designed by software written on the previous CPUs, machines are engineered on machines, and so on. The digital civilization is bootstrapping itself and eventually might leave the cocoon.

Saying other forms of life won't have parts that self-maintain to a degree is quite odd, because it's logically impossible. You see if you are not made of semi-indendent parts, you become extremely fragile. What exactly you think is the alternative? This is not about silicon vs carbon or analog vs digital. It's more about basic logic.




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