It is said that when the renowned wit Dorothy Parker was told that former US president Calvin Coolidge was dead she responded by asking ‘how can they tell?’ I kept thinking of this anecdote when I heard that scientists in California have created a form of artificial life.

Maybe that’s because most life is pretty artificial nowadays anyway.
By way of example, have you personally ever met any of the bimbos and himbos that pass as celebrities? Are you sure they exist? Isn’t it just as likely that they are neither more nor less real than Lara Croft?
It’s a sustainable argument! Up to 60% of celebs may be virtual fabrications… Either way, how would you know? Frankly, it’s all a soap opera and any cast manager will tell you it’d be far more straightforward to keep a cast of virtual people going than to have to deal with all the vagaries of humans…
And that’s before you get to all the physical redrafting that goes into yer everyday List C celeb. Jordan’s tits anyone?
Or friendship… are we all convinced that our Facebook friends are any more real than the names attached to spam emails offering you generic Viagra or an enlarged willie?
Early adapters don’t care one way or the other. They just love it, the networking and tweeting and communications chaos. It’s all just great... gas!
In this they may represent the key driver of evolution, the urge to try the new, to explore the next frontier even before we’ve secured the old.
But there are risks. Many are to do with privacy. Social network websites are pretty risky when it comes to the details of our lives. A lot of people have posted items that they now regret which, like tattoos, can be very hard to erase.
And it’s not just their friendships that come under strain. Prospective employers have no compunction about snooping around what is already in the public domain. And would you blame them? There are no secrets on social network sites. This is the point.
But other risks are to do with that permeable boundary between real and artificial, the uncertainty that what seems to be actually is.
In truth we’re still coming to terms with a new paradigm. The whole point about the original ‘reality’ TV programme Real Life is that it was a construct. The post-modern irony underpinning Big Brother as ‘reality television’ is that while what it shows is actually happening it can’t be described as reality, insofar as the word has any general meaning.
In addition to increasingly heated discussions about reality and privacy in the digital age, there’s also a growing debate about social and personal interaction in virtual worlds… for example, whether online commentators should be able to remain anonymous.
Those who might be termed digital ideologists have argued from the outset that the internet had effectively destroyed censorship of ideas. But many who fervently support the free circulation of ideas are starting to baulk at the freedom the internet gives to online commentators to slander and abuse.
In the real world you’re expected to be identifiable and a matrix of protections is in place to govern what can be said in public. This hasn’t yet happened in the same way in the virtual world and a lot of people now think that it must. Because right now the anonymity of the virtual world means that lies and slanders are deliberately spread about people out of pure maliciousness and as part of a million vendettas.
Moreover, as with your social networking website, everything hangs around in cyberspace. The libels knowingly spread by fundamentally nasty liars with an axe to grind linger.
Some folks portray this as freedom of expression. And it’s true that the internet equalises all in the sense that anyone can post comments. But it’s also true that a significant proportion of comments are made by what seem to be disturbed, sometimes deranged, and often agenda-driven individuals.
It might not matter that much except that it may be one of the key drivers of the new brutality of public discourse. Journalists are very influenced by favourite blogs and online commentary.
Or, to set it against another of the freedoms arising from the web, there is increasing concern at increasing levels of sexual violence among younger teenagers whose behaviours derive from an unhealthy blend of web-watched porn, hip-hop vids and mobile phone msgs. Apparently, they think this stuff is real.
It is complicated. In addition to effectively creating a parallel universe, the web has also built another that straddles the real and virtual, one in which, for example, young people in Iran can see and hear far beyond the borders, from behind the veil.
Behaviours can be learned, standards can emerge from chaos, civility can outgrow brutality. The virtual can mimic the real… well, the ideal real at any rate!
We might as well get used to it all, the fluidity, the chaos, the frenzy of development, because it ain’t going to change any time soon. A child born in 2010 will, everything being equal, see in the 22nd century.
But by their 90s they’ll probably only be half themselves, with vital organs and limbs quite likely replaced, not to mention inter and intra-cellular alterations to make their bodies and brains more efficient.
In this, the creation of artificial life is just another small step for mankind.
Will reality 2100 be any more peculiar, exciting, vicious, creative or brutal than what we already have in our reality, our virtuality or the twilight in-between?
No one knows. All we can say for sure is that it will be life Jim, but not as we know it.