Comment by bamboozled

Anything that becomes alive and replicating starts to lose the advantage of non-life.

Once something is alive, and wants to stay alive, a huge raft of problems are introduced.

Existential risks and management become real, getting energy, or acquiring energy to stay alive starts to become a concern, then self-improvement or "replicating" might become an existential risk because competition might start to happen, variations will arise, it would just get chaotic fairly quickly. I don't think we can truly comprehend how incredibly complex living things are. We're just glossing over it all.

Once the living process begins, whatever "artificial life" life exists, might quite quickly adopt similar or the same problems as biological life and spend a lot more of it's time staying alive (think about how complex our immune systems are) than we can imagine.