Not exactly the kind of thing we were hoping to hear, but geniuses aren’t worthy of the title unless they are thought-provoking and unpredictable, and Stephen Hawking – there to promote the CD-ROM version of A Brief History of Time – has been telling attendees at MacWorld in Boston that computer viruses fit the definition of a living system even though it has no metabolism of its own and parasitically uses the metabolism of the host computer: I think computer viruses should count as life, he averred, adding sadly I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we’ve created so far is purely destructive – we’ve created life in our own image.
