{"id":244812,"date":"2026-10-02T09:02:23","date_gmt":"2026-10-02T14:02:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/10\/danko-nikolic-and-john-smart-on-ai-practopoiesis-and-autopoiesis"},"modified":"2026-10-02T09:02:23","modified_gmt":"2026-10-02T14:02:23","slug":"danko-nikolic-and-john-smart-on-ai-practopoiesis-and-autopoiesis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/10\/danko-nikolic-and-john-smart-on-ai-practopoiesis-and-autopoiesis","title":{"rendered":"Danko Nikolic and John Smart on AI, Practopoiesis, and Autopoiesis"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/danko-nikolic-and-john-smart-on-ai-practopoiesis-and-autopoiesis.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p><audio controls style=\"width:625px;\"><source src=\"https:\/\/feeds.soundcloud.com\/stream\/1335644329-singularity1on1-danko-nikolic-john-smart.mp3?_=1\" type=\"audio\/mpeg\"><\/audio><\/p>\n<p>Three months before ChatGPT changed everything, I sat down for two hours with a neuroscientist and a complex systems theorist to ask a question most of the #AI industry still isn\u2019t asking:<\/p>\n<p>What if we\u2019re building intelligence the wrong way?<\/p>\n<p>Danko Nikolic ran a lab at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research. He went into neuroscience because he was frustrated with the limits of artificial neural networks. John Smart co-founded the Evo-Devo Universe research community and has spent decades studying how complex adaptive systems actually grow.<\/p>\n<p>One argues we need to copy the brain more deeply. The other argues we need to copy life itself. Neither thinks bigger models alone get us there.<\/p>\n<p>In 2022 that sounded contrarian. In 2026, with trillion-dollar bets riding on scale and #AIAlignment still unsolved, it\u2019s a question worth asking again: is bigger enough, or are we missing something only biology can teach?<\/p>\n<p>We get into practopoiesis and where intelligence comes from, the power-law problem with piling on parameters, whether we need hardware that breaks from von Neumann, and why both of them think emotion and #consciousness can\u2019t be bolted on later.<\/p>\n<div class=\"more-link-wrapper\"> <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/10\/danko-nikolic-and-john-smart-on-ai-practopoiesis-and-autopoiesis\">Continue reading \u201cDanko Nikolic and John Smart on AI, Practopoiesis, and Autopoiesis\u201d | &gt;<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Three months before ChatGPT changed everything, I sat down for two hours with a neuroscientist and a complex systems theorist to ask a question most of the #AI industry still isn\u2019t asking: What if we\u2019re building intelligence the wrong way? Danko Nikolic ran a lab at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research. He went [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":737,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1527,47,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-244812","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-alien-life","category-neuroscience","category-robotics-ai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/244812","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/737"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=244812"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/244812\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=244812"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=244812"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=244812"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}