All software relies on hardware. (parent (parent)) is imagining AI software as being grown, not written, and sees a strong likelihood that such "grown" software

All software relies on hardware. (parent (parent)) is imagining AI software as being grown, not written, and sees a strong likelihood that such "grown" software will rely strongly on emergent properties of its hardware substrate. Circuits "grown", actually evolved by means of a genetic algorithm, on FPGAs, are known to behave in this fashion; see the "On the Origin of Circuits" cite for examples at small scale -- in short, you can, with an FPGA as substrate, evolve a circuit capable of distinguishing 1KHz from 10KHz tones, but what you end up with is so tightly bound to that particular environment that, when you "pull the plug" and copy the FPGA configuration from the chip where it evolved onto another chip from the same production run, it doesn't work at all. Of course, it's reasonable to question whether the technique described in the cite could possibly scale to "growing" something like a general AI, or at least whether it could do so in any remotely practicable span of time. But among AI theorists it's a fairly common surmise, and given results already seen for the technique, it's entirely plausible that a general AI grown by such methods would be so intimately bound to the hardware where it "grew up" that, even assuming you could copy it from its "home machine" to another machine of identical configuration, there's no reason to assume the copy would work correctly, or indeed at all. (And all of this goes to the question of where precisely you draw the line between hardware and software, anyway. Into which category does a given FPGA's configuration of gates fall? Does your answer change depending on whether that configuration has origin in a Verilog file, or in the result of a process of directed evolution? What about the configuration of neurons in your brain on which runs the consciousness that calls itself "I"? I don't pretend to have definitive answers, or indeed any answers, to such questions as these, but they are certainly worth considering in such a discussion as this one.)