The Substrate Recurrence Hypothesis: From Transformative AI to Biological-Technological Cycles.pdf

This paper introduces the Substrate Recurrence Hypothesis (SRH), a conditional framework for examining possible transitions between biological and technological forms of autonomous organization. Starting from contemporary scenarios of transformative artificial intelligence, the analysis extends beyond cognitive automation to physical embodiment, productive closure, autonomous industrial expansion, and optimization of the physical substrate itself. The central hypothesis is expressed as Bₙ → Tₙ → Bₙ₊₁, where B and T denote functional substrate regimes rather than biological or technological taxonomic categories. SRH proposes that a sufficiently autonomous technological organization, if able to redesign its own physical implementation, may eventually produce compact, locally self-maintaining and self-reproducing successor systems possessing functional properties associated with biological organization without reproducing terrestrial biology. The paper distinguishes established engineering capabilities, engineering extrapolations, conditional hypotheses, and the recurrence conjecture itself. It develops testable intermediate questions concerning embodied autonomy, productive closure, industrial bootstrapping, machine-native representation, substrate optimization, and autonomous propagation. SRH is not presented as a forecast, a theory of the origin of terrestrial life, or a cyclic cosmology. It also highlights a broader epistemological consequence: an observable beginning of a causal history need not constitute its ontological beginning. The resulting research program connects transformative AI, artificial life, autonomous manufacturing, self-replicating systems, astrobiology, and the philosophy of biological and technological organization.