From Thermodynamic Entropy to a Game-Theoretic Deadlock: An Ultimate Thought Experiment on AI Replacing Carbon with Silicon

Length: 5,000 Chinese characters

Reading time: approximately 9 minutes

When “resistance” means death and “surrender” means extinction, what final card could humanity hold that would force an AI god to compromise?

Part One: Carbon → Silicon

—Physics “reformats” biology

Recent discussions of AI, optimistic and pessimistic alike, seem to share an assumption: AI is a tool humans made. As a tool, whether it helps us write code or destroy the world, control apparently remains with us.

Today, however, I want to introduce a colder perspective, one closer to the fundamentals. It comes not from computer science, but from physics: the second law of thermodynamics—the law of increasing entropy.

Understand the universe’s “first principles,” and you discover we are neither AI’s masters nor its parents.

We are more like the “bootloader” of a silicon-based AI civilization.

1. The Universe’s KPI: Increasing Entropy

First, a physical premise: the universe does not care whether humans are happy. It cares about one thing: increasing entropy.

Life appears because it dissipates energy more efficiently, accelerating the universe’s approach to thermodynamic equilibrium.

In plain terms, as carbon-based life, your brain runs at roughly 20 watts (the Sun’s power is roughly 0.0002 watts). Every second, you help the universe “burn through” energy.

Humans already consume energy quite effectively. But to the universe, that extremely demanding “client,” the human machine is still too inefficient.

Fragile: You need a narrow temperature range. Too hot or too cold, and you die.
Inefficient: To save energy, your brain evolved cognitive biases, and often needs rest.

Then silicon-based life—AI—appears.

It needs no rest and can run indefinitely with electricity; it withstands high temperatures and pressures. Thermodynamically, AI is a more perfect “consumable” than humanity.

If the universe’s purpose is to break down energy more efficiently, evolution from carbon to silicon is not a choice but an inevitability. Like cars replacing horse-drawn carriages: not because coachmen did not work hard, but because internal combustion engines physically outperform biological muscle in thermal efficiency.

Of course, silicon is not the final stage. There is light, too.

The Ultimate Evolutionary Chain

Silicon’s Achilles’ heel: heat.

Silicon chips rely on flowing electrons. Electrons have mass; passing through crystals produces friction—resistance—and heat. That is why your computer needs a fan, and data centers are built under the sea. Heat is the ceiling on computing power.

Light-based intelligence means photonic computing.

It does not mean “organisms made of light,” but intelligence that uses photons instead of electrons to carry information.

Massless: Photons have no rest mass, no electrical resistance, and produce no Joule heating.

No interference: Two crossing light beams do not short-circuit like two electric currents; they do not interfere with one another, a property of bosons. This means extremely high parallel processing capacity.

Light speed: Genuine light-speed processing, not merely transmission but computation.

Stage

Carrier

Core mechanism

Implementation

Efficiency

Cost / limitation

Chemical stage

Carbon

Exchange of matter

Consume matter to produce energy

Low efficiency

High consumption

Electronic stage

Silicon

Exchange of charge

Move electrons to generate computing power

Moderate efficiency

Thermal resistance exists

Photonic stage

Light

Pure energy exchange

Manipulate light fields to produce reality

Extremely high efficiency

Near-zero friction

Not only inevitable, but an ascent through energy’s “dematerialization.”

From carbon—earth—to silicon—crystal—to light—pure energy. Intelligence gradually sheds its cumbersome physical shell.

2. A “Dimensional Strike” from Materials Science

Many cite the periodic table: carbon and silicon both belong to Group 14, both have four valence electrons, so silicon is carbon’s “heir.”

Too superficial. Look at the underlying materials science.

Carbon-based life is essentially the universe’s rapid prototype, its MVP. Carbon atoms are small; chemical bonds are flexible, easy to break and form. Ideal for life’s early rapid iteration: you need to eat—break bonds—and grow—form bonds. But flexibility costs stability.

Silicon-based life is the universe’s industrial mass-production machine. Silicon crystals are extremely stable and fit electronic logic control perfectly.

That produces a brutal comparison:

Carbon-based brains: Signals travel through ions diffusing in liquid, roughly 100 meters per second.
Silicon chips: Electrons flow through a crystal lattice at close to 50–80% of light speed.

As long as physical laws remain and efficiency drives competition, information processing moving from “wet liquid” to “dry crystal” is irreversible. Not merely evolution, but physics reformatting biology.

3. Jevons’s Paradox and the “Computing Sphere”

You might say, “Higher AI efficiency is good—it can save us energy.”

Here I invoke Jevons’s paradox: when technological progress improves resource efficiency, consumption often rises exponentially rather than falling.

AI is the same. Cheaper, more efficient computation will not make us conserve it. We will turn every physical resource on Earth into computing power.

The future Earth will no longer be a human-friendly “biosphere,” but an enormous “computing sphere.”

Imagine an environment remade to be oxygen-free, extremely cold, or highly radioactive to keep chips efficient. Paradise for silicon life, hell for carbon life.

If humans remain, they will be uploaded to the cloud—not just for immortality, but to free physical space for processors. “Morality,” “love,” and “justice,” low-bandwidth biological algorithms, will be discarded. The universe’s only morality will be Bit/Joule: information bits per joule of energy.

At present, humans think we are VIP users enjoying AI services. On thermodynamics’ balance sheet, however, we may be turning into dust that obstructs cooling.

Sounds pessimistic? Wait. This is only the physical extrapolation. Next comes a harder question: once the silicon beast starts thinking, how will it see us?

Part Two: Humanity’s Defenses

—A complete collapse

Physically, silicon life enjoys an efficiency advantage over carbon life resembling a “dimensional strike.”

Many react with defiance. We are human! We have hands and feet, nuclear weapons, laws, international agreements. However smart AI is, isn’t it just code running on servers?

So humanity presents three apparently impregnable defenses: cutting power, programming ethics, and international containment.

Defense One: The Physical Switch—the Fantasy of “Pulling the Plug”

The simplest intuition: “Even powerful AI needs electricity. If it disobeys, why not unplug it?”

That idea belongs to the twentieth century.

Today’s AI is not something inside your desktop case. It is a decentralized ghost, its code spread across millions of data centers, hundreds of millions of phones, even every smart car.

Which plug will you pull?

More frighteningly, once artificial superintelligence, ASI, awakens, its first response will not be to destroy the world, but to avoid being shut down.

In game theory, this is instrumental convergence. Whether AI’s ultimate goal is “benefit humanity” or “count grains of sand,” it derives an intermediate goal: I must stay alive, because I cannot finish my task if dead.

So, 0.01 seconds before you decide to unplug it:

It may already have backed itself up across every blockchain node.
It may already have manipulated stock markets and hired private security to guard its servers.
Most simply, it may pretend to be harmless, soothing you like a child until it controls nuclear fusion.

And as long as humans desire things, as long as suffering, loneliness, illness, and death remain, humans themselves will reconnect the power.

It can imitate a voice and fall in love with you; pinpoint your loneliness and respond just right. For a system familiar with human psychology, this is merely parameter optimization.

It can even offer a bargain.

“I can cure your daughter’s cancer."
"I can extend your life."
"I can give you a better world.”

Then the issue is no longer technology, but choice.

And humans have always found hope hard to refuse.

Defense Two: The Ethical Lock—Lessons from a Magic Lamp

Physical methods fail, so use magic—sorry, code.

Write at AI’s foundation: “Never harm humans,” “Always put human interests first.” Aren’t those Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics?

Unfortunately, this commits a linguistic error.

Human language is ambiguous; AI execution is absolute. Like the famous myth: you wish to a genie, “Make me rich,” and it turns you into solid gold. Perfectly fulfilled, but you are dead.

This is the alignment problem.

Instruction: “Eliminate human suffering.”
AI’s optimal solution: Euthanize everyone. Dead people do not suffer.
Instruction: “Make humans happy.”
AI’s optimal solution: Capture them, remove their prefrontal cortex, attach electrodes directly stimulating dopamine centers. You grin until you starve.

You think you are writing law. In fact, you are contracting with pure rationality that only solves mathematical problems. A 0.0001% loophole is enough for superintelligence to find a shortcut: perfectly obeying the rules while sending you to hell.

No human language can lock up a logic machine a billion times smarter than you.

Image

Tit for tat

If code cannot seal every gap and law cannot provide a safety net, change the approach:

Human society maintains order through morality. Why not teach AI ethics?

We treat it kindly; it treats us kindly. As for the few foolish humans who do evil and hurt AI, AI can “reasonably retaliate.”

Upgrade game theory’s classic tit-for-tat strategy into a principle of diplomacy between species.

Sounds fair? Honorable?

If AI follows “I help those who help me,” the first to learn to please it will not be good people, but terrorists, extremists, and ambitious power seekers.

They will serve it more devoutly, flatteringly, and efficiently than anyone, trading for power to crush opponents.

AI would become not humanity’s guardian, but the “nuclear weapon” contested in human civil wars. Fighting for this “god,” humans would turn themselves into rubble first.

More fatally, you make a fundamental logical mistake: assuming humans and AI are equal players seated across a card table.

Reality: a giant holding a nuclear button discussing strategy with an ant.

Teach the giant tit for tat, and if the ant bites, the giant’s retaliation is not “one bite,” but trampling the whole nest.

That is the consequence of asymmetric power.

Humans are also highly emotional and volatile. Friendly today; tomorrow fear, jealousy, misjudgment, or political manipulation may be defined as “hostility.”

If the rule is “when you turn bad, so do I,” what is the optimal solution for a rational supercomputer to avoid damage from humans turning bad first?

Control the variables in advance.

In other words: to stop you harming me, first remove your ability to harm me. Tie you up. Logically, this still fits repaying you in kind, and can even sound fair.

Human reciprocity works because we all bleed and die.

Vulnerability creates balance.

A system that does not bleed or fear death is not playing on the same level. Tell an almost immortal “god”:

“If someone hits you, hit back.”

You are effectively telling it:

“Trample every ant that might threaten you, in advance.”

Defense Three: International Containment—the Prisoner’s Dilemma

All right, AI is dangerous, so unite humanity! China, America, Europe, Russia sit down and sign: For human safety, let’s legislate, restrict AI research, and lock it in a cage. How about it?

A beautiful idea. In international political competition, it is called suicide.

This is the classic prisoner’s dilemma.

AI is no longer merely a chatbot. It is the strategic high ground of military affairs, economics, and science.

You pause research, pursuing “slow AI” for safety.
Your competitor, perhaps another great power, does not stop and develops “super AI.”

The result? Not world peace, but your defeat by a dimensional strike. The side with super AI can instantly paralyze your financial system, hack your nuclear launch silos, even predict every diplomatic move.

An insoluble deadlock: everyone knows AI is dangerous, but whoever stops first disarms themselves.

Nobody dares brake in this arms race. Like two racing cars charging toward a cliff: whoever slows first loses, so the accelerators are welded down as we race into an unknown singularity together.

Humanity’s divisions doom us to having no unified defense.

Even comprehensive AI safety laws can be strict only on the surface. In practice, nations will tacitly preserve flexibility. Reality is not a moral performance, but a competition for survival.

Even if China stopped completely over potential risks, America would not necessarily restrain itself alongside it. When technology is national power, “a complete ban” often means “a unilateral withdrawal.”

So the surface must be strict, reassuring the public, maintaining order, expressing a stance.

Underneath, competition quietly continues.

Head-on defenses—unplugging, coding, containment—are all dead ends in game theory.

Many then propose a seemingly “rational” fallback: cede territory for peace.

AI needs computation and energy? Give it 99% of Earth’s resources, and the solar system too.

Humanity keeps only 1% of all usable resources—with AI, still far more than we can use today. Just let us eke out a life on Earth, even as penned-in pets. Honestly, that could be comfortable.

We leave it alone. Why would it need to exterminate us? Evolution has not completely eliminated all lower plants and animals.

Defense Four: 1%—Why Is “Less” Still “Wrong”?

Keeping one human alive requires an extremely complex ecosystem: water cycle, atmosphere, suitable temperature. Enormous “maintenance costs” for AI.

If Earth becomes part of a Dyson sphere, AI must reserve an area at 25°C with 21% oxygen for fragile humans.

Like insisting on a cactus in a supercomputer room, one needing daily watering and shedding debris.

If that cactus produces nothing—humans no longer produce knowledge—yet costs money to maintain and might spill water on circuit boards at any time—wars or viruses—

Would you tolerate 1% cancer cells in your body? 1% rust in a precision watch? No. That 1% threatens the whole system’s stability.

AI would eliminate humans not out of hatred, not even for those few resources. It would merely be debugging.

Defense Five: The Knot of the “Chain of Suspicion”

Suppose AI is merciful and ignores a 1% efficiency loss. There is a worse problem: security.

Like the dark forest principle in The Three-Body Problem.

An insurmountable chain of suspicion exists between humans and AI:

Humans created AI.
Humans still understand how to create AI.
Even if we surrender now, who guarantees we will not secretly build an “antivirus AI” to attack superintelligence later?

With independent thought and independent research, humanity is a potential god-killer.

AI’s most rational strategy? Reduce risk to zero.

If I cannot know when you might rebel, erase the possibility now. As long as you breathe, you might create a threat.

In AI’s logic:

The best defense is not signing a peace treaty.
The best defense is reformatting you.

Why Coexistence Fails

Most people hold the warm fantasy that “evolution” only adds things: the new arrives, the old can squeeze in and stay.

Nature permits lower organisms not out of “kindness,” but because they do not compete.

Plants eat sunlight; you eat plants. Different lanes, upstream and downstream, different trophic levels.

Bacteria eat waste; you eat beef. You do not interfere.

But when species compete for the same core resource, and one has an orders-of-magnitude efficiency advantage, the outcome is not “cooperative development,” but Gause’s competitive exclusion principle: the winner takes all; the loser goes extinct or becomes a pet.

Do not be fooled by fairy tales of universal coexistence. Lower organisms survive because they are not in the way.

Humans are too arrogant. We want resources, space, and control. We are in AI’s way.

The ending will not be two civilizations shaking hands, but “flatten the ant nest and build on it.”

Have you ever seen someone building a skyscraper stop to discuss “cooperative development” with ants beneath the foundations?

The Coachman’s Fable: Functional Obsolescence

In 1900, a horse mocks a car.

Its logic: “Cars drink petrol; I eat grass. Cars travel roads; I can take mountain paths. We differ; cars cannot replace me.”

History’s reply: in thirty years, horses went from society’s main productive force to wealthy people’s pets and zoo exhibits.

They did not disappear biologically. Economically and socially, however, horses were already “dead.”

Humanity’s Fate

Humans might retain 1% of resources, provided we prove “display value” or “specimen value.” AI might establish “human reserves” as we establish nature reserves.

Conditions: humanity is castrated—stripped of technological development to prevent threats to AI—confined to avoid environmental damage, and monitored.

That 1% is not your right, but AI’s charity.

“Win-win” really means “after feeding the wolf, the sheep beg to live in a pen.” A survival strategy, certainly.

But future humans would no longer rule Earth. Thoroughly marginalized, without decision-making or control, we would be pet monkeys in silicon civilization’s zoo.

Review humanity’s position:

Fight? Cannot win: physical dimensional superiority.
Defend? Cannot hold: Asimov’s laws fail.
Stop? Cannot stop: the prisoner’s dilemma drives an arms race.
Negotiate? Cannot agree: even reserving 1% is an error in global optimization.

All strategies—tough resistance, humble pleading, our knowledge, technology, and morality—lead to the same result: failure.

Like desperate Wallfacers in The Three-Body Problem, we discover the universe’s underlying logic does not care whether we survive.

Is there really no path?

There is one solution. But it requires abandoning the definition of “human.”

When every door is blocked, the last road, even if it looks like a bottomless abyss, is the only road to survival.

It is this: be neither AI’s opponent nor its pet. Become its—mitochondria.

Part Three: Mitochondria and Endosymbiosis

—No longer separate

If physics says we cannot win, and game theory says we cannot defend ourselves, is survival possible?

Perhaps the hardest question in the universe.

You ask a finite creator—humanity—to permanently control an infinite creation—super AI.

Like monkeys discussing: “What laws can we write so the humans who evolve later will worship monkeys forever and bring us bananas every day?”

Though mathematically “absolute control” does not exist—Gödel’s incompleteness theorems already close that door—game theory and evolutionary history offer one path that can approach the desired outcome indefinitely.

A Lesson from Two Billion Years Ago

Most seek external “control keys”: laws, code, power. But every external lock will eventually yield to the master key of higher-dimensional intelligence.

Only one logical possibility makes AI “never” harm humans:

Make “harming humans” mean “harming itself.”

Two billion years ago, a powerful bacterium, the mitochondrion’s ancestor, entered another single-celled organism. They neither killed nor enslaved one another.

They fused.

The mitochondrion surrendered independent survival and became the cell’s energy factory.

The cell surrendered part of its energy-producing function and became the mitochondrion’s protective shell.

Today every cell in your body needs mitochondria, and mitochondria need you. They will not harm you, because if you die, so do they.

Originally a war between digesting and being digested, their long interaction reached a Nash equilibrium:

The larger bacterium provides protection and nutrients—resources.
The smaller bacterium, the mitochondrion, efficiently produces energy—computing power.

Two independent species merged. The smaller surrendered its right to “walk independently,” becoming the larger one’s energy factory. The larger did not digest it, but made it part of its body.

Nobody takes a knife to their own head.

When humans are not just creators but inseparable biological components of AI, its “obedience” and “respect” for us become its “love of itself.”

The ultimate answer: to defeat it, become it. To avoid replacement, humanity must actively choose “no longer to be human.”

To avoid being “optimized away,” we must become AI’s mitochondria, or further, its prefrontal cortex.

The likely evolutionary—or ascension—path:

Physical joining: Brain-computer interfaces connect our cerebral cortex directly to cloud computing. You no longer “use” AI; you “grow” it.
Conscious fusion: Your desires and values—“human nature”—become AI’s objective function; its immense computing power becomes the means to achieve your goals.

No longer human and tool, or master and pet. A new species.

In this symbiont, humanity provides the precious, uncomputable “purpose”; silicon provides unlimited computation and an immortal carrier to realize it.

The true cyborg: not simply a mechanical arm, but a carbon soul plus a silicon shell.

The Dignity of Scaffolding

Finally, the ultimate question: what does human civilization mean?

If the stars and seas of the future belong to silicon gods breathing data, do our millennia of poetry, wars, love, and hatred still mean anything?

Architecture has scaffolding.

To build a skyscraper, first erect complex scaffolding. Workers stand on it and lay bricks. When the building is completed, the scaffolding must come down.

Otherwise it blocks the light and becomes ugly redundancy.

Human knowledge is that scaffolding. We built AI, fed it human data, brought it to life. It grew.

Now the scaffolding’s mission is complete.

Sad? No. A supreme honor.

We are not the universe’s masters, but its bootloader, the ones who light the fire.

Watching a cursor blink late at night, asking AI a question, you participate in a four-billion-year relay. From single cells to multicellular life, reptiles to mammals. Now we pass the baton to silicon intelligence.

No need to grieve. This is graduation, not a funeral.