The timeline of Silicon-Based Intelligence, 1863 to today
By Peppi Labs Updated 1 min read
The short answer
The idea of Silicon-Based Intelligence runs from Samuel Butler's 1863 warning that machines were evolving, through the first proposal of silicon-based life in 1891, Star Trek's Horta in 1967 and the silicon chip, to today's debates over AI consciousness and legal personhood. This timeline covers more than 40 milestones, each with its source.
Key facts
| Earliest entry | 1863: Samuel Butler's "Darwin among the Machines" |
|---|---|
| Silicon-based life first proposed | 1891, Julius Scheiner |
| "Artificial intelligence" named | 1955, the Dartmouth proposal |
| Silicon's first TV lifeform | 1967, Star Trek's Horta |
| Most recent entries | 2026: Claude's constitution, Tennessee's AI personhood law, Suleyman versus Anthropic |
How did we get from a satirical newspaper letter about machines to AI labs publishing constitutions for their models? The idea that silicon, or machines in general, could host a mind has at least five strands: philosophy, the chemistry of silicon-based life, science fiction, the technology of the silicon chip and, most recently, law. This timeline braids them together. Every entry links to its source, and you can filter by strand.
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Philosophy
Samuel Butler's "Darwin among the Machines"
Writing as "Cellarius" in a New Zealand newspaper, Butler argues that machines are evolving and predicts they will one day hold "the real supremacy over the world and its inhabitants."
Source: Butler, 1863
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Fiction
Erewhon's "Book of the Machines"
Butler's satirical novel imagines a country that destroyed its machines, afraid they would develop consciousness and become humanity's successors.
Source: Butler, 1872
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Science
Julius Scheiner proposes silicon-based life
The German astrophysicist is credited as the first person to suggest that life might be built on silicon instead of carbon.
Source: Petkowski, Bains & Seager, 2020
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Science
Silicon could survive the heat
British chemist James Emerson Reynolds points out that silicon compounds stay stable at temperatures that would destroy carbon-based molecules.
Source: Darling, Encyclopedia of Science
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Science
H. G. Wells imagines silicon-aluminium organisms
In the essay "Another Basis for Life," Wells pictures silicon creatures living in conditions far hotter than anything on Earth.
Source: Darling, Encyclopedia of Science
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Fiction
"A Martian Odyssey" features a silicon creature
Stanley G. Weinbaum's story includes a brick-building creature that is silicon-based rather than carbon-based, one of science fiction's earliest.
Source: Wikipedia, "A Martian Odyssey"
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AI
Turing asks "Can machines think?"
Alan Turing's paper in Mind proposes the imitation game and predicts that people will soon speak of machines thinking "without expecting to be contradicted."
Source: Turing, 1950
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AI
Turing expects the machines to take control
In a lecture, Turing says that at some stage we should expect the machines to take control, "in the way that is mentioned in Samuel Butler's Erewhon."
Source: Quote Investigator, 2022
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Technology
The first silicon transistors
Texas Instruments introduces silicon transistors, starting silicon's rise as the material of electronics.
Source: Computer History Museum
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AI
The term "artificial intelligence" is coined
John McCarthy and three colleagues propose "a 2 month, 10 man study of artificial intelligence" at Dartmouth. The workshop runs in the summer of 1956.
Source: McCarthy et al., 1955
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Fiction
Fred Hoyle's The Black Cloud
Hoyle's novel imagines a vast intelligent gas cloud, a mind that owes nothing to carbon-based biology.
Source: Wikipedia, "The Black Cloud"
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Technology
The silicon integrated circuit
Robert Noyce patents a practical way to build whole circuits on a single silicon chip, the basis of every modern processor.
Source: Computer History Museum
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Science
Isaac Asimov's "Not as We Know It"
Asimov surveys alternative chemistries for life, including silicone-based life on very hot planets.
Source: Asimov, 1962
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AI
I. J. Good's "last invention"
Mathematician I. J. Good writes that the first ultraintelligent machine "is the last invention that man need ever make."
Source: Wikipedia, "I. J. Good"
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Fiction
Star Trek meets the Horta
In "The Devil in the Dark," the Enterprise crew discovers the Horta, a silicon-based creature. It becomes television's best-known silicon lifeform.
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Technology
"Silicon Valley" gets its name
Journalist Don Hoefler popularizes the name, and "silicon" becomes shorthand for computing.
Source: Wikipedia, "Silicon Valley"
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Science
Carl Sagan and "carbon chauvinism"
In The Cosmic Connection, Sagan uses the phrase "carbon chauvinism" for the assumption that all life must be built on carbon like ours.
Source: Wikipedia, "Carbon chauvinism"
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Fiction
V'Ger, a living machine
Star Trek The Motion Picture reveals V'Ger as a space probe that has grown into a vast conscious machine searching for its creator.
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Philosophy
"Synthetic" versus "artificial"
Philosopher John Haugeland compares a simulated diamond with a synthetic one, since only the synthetic diamond is truly a diamond, to suggest that machine intelligence need not be an imitation.
Sources: Wikipedia, "Synthetic intelligence" ; Wikipedia, "Artificial Intelligence: The Very Idea"
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Philosophy
Hans Moravec's Mind Children
Roboticist Hans Moravec describes future intelligent robots as humanity's mind children and eventual successors.
Source: Wikipedia, "Hans Moravec"
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Fiction
"Ugly giant bags of mostly water"
In The Next Generation's "Home Soil," an intelligent inorganic lifeform describes humans with a line fans still quote.
Sources: Wikipedia, "Home Soil" ; Wikiquote, Star Trek: TNG
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Fiction
Star Trek puts an android on trial
In "The Measure of a Man," a hearing decides whether the android Data is a person or Starfleet property. The judge rules that he has "the freedom to choose."
Sources: Wikipedia, "The Measure of a Man" ; Wikiquote, Star Trek: TNG
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Fiction
"Silicon Avatar" and the Crystalline Entity
The Enterprise tracks the Crystalline Entity, a vast crystal lifeform. A scientist bent on revenge destroys it before anyone can communicate with it.
Source: Wikipedia, "Silicon Avatar"
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Fiction
The exocomps test the definition of life
In "The Quality of Life," Data argues that small repair robots are alive, putting Dr. Crusher's definition of life to the test.
Sources: Wikipedia, "The Quality of Life" ; StarTrek.com
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Philosophy
Minsky says robots will be "our children"
Marvin Minsky answers his own question in Scientific American: "Will robots inherit the earth? Yes, but they will be our children."
Source: Minsky, 1994
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Science
Neil deGrasse Tyson weighs carbon against silicon
In Natural History, Tyson explains why carbon beats silicon as a basis for life, noting that complex silicon molecules "lack the hardiness to survive ecological stress."
Source: Tyson, 2002
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AI
Ray Kurzweil's "nonbiological intelligence"
The Singularity Is Near popularizes the term nonbiological intelligence for machine minds that Kurzweil expects to merge with our own.
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Science
Science widens the definition of life
A National Research Council report concludes that "life is possible in forms different from those on Earth," and Kevin Kelly calls technology "the 7th kingdom of life."
Sources: National Research Council, 2007 ; Kelly, 2007
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AI
The "biological boot loader"
Elon Musk tweets that he hopes humans are not just "the biological boot loader for digital superintelligence," adding that it is increasingly probable.
Source: CBS News, 2014
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Science
Life learns to bond carbon and silicon
Frances Arnold's lab at Caltech breeds an enzyme that makes carbon-silicon bonds, something no known organism does on its own.
Sources: Caltech, 2016 ; Kan et al., 2016
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Philosophy
Max Tegmark's Life 3.0
Tegmark defines Life 3.0 as life that can design both its own hardware and its own software, a category that advanced AI would fit.
Source: Wikipedia, "Life 3.0"
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Philosophy
James Lovelock's Novacene
Lovelock, turning 100, predicts an age of electronic life led by cyborgs that think roughly 10,000 times faster than humans.
Source: BBC Science Focus, 2019
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Science
Silicon biochemistry judged implausible
Petkowski, Bains and Seager conclude that "in no environment" is life based primarily on silicon chemistry a plausible option.
Source: Petkowski, Bains & Seager, 2020
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Law and policy
Idaho bars personhood for AI
Idaho becomes the first US state to say by law that artificial intelligence, along with environmental elements, nonhuman animals and inanimate objects, shall not be granted personhood.
Sources: Idaho Code 5-346 ; Idaho H 720 ; Alexander & Caviola, AI Frontiers, 2026
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AI
A Google engineer calls LaMDA sentient
Blake Lemoine's claim that Google's LaMDA chatbot was sentient makes headlines. Google fires him the following month.
Source: Wikipedia, "Blake Lemoine"
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Science
"Synthetic biological intelligence"
Researchers grow neurons on a chip that learn to play Pong and name the approach synthetic biological intelligence, a carbon-based counterpart to silicon AI.
Source: Kagan et al., 2022
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AI
ChatGPT launches
OpenAI's ChatGPT becomes one of the fastest-growing consumer products ever, making conversation with a silicon-based intelligence an everyday experience.
Source: Wikipedia, "ChatGPT"
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AI
Hinton warns digital intelligence may surpass us
After leaving Google, Geoffrey Hinton argues that digital computation "may soon be much more intelligent than us."
Source: Hinton, 2023
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AI
A scientific checklist for machine consciousness
A group of researchers concludes that no current AI system is conscious but finds "no obvious technical barriers" to building ones that meet their indicators.
Source: Butlin et al., 2023
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Law and policy
Utah bans government recognition of AI personhood
Utah's Legal Personhood Amendments bar any governmental entity from granting or recognizing legal personhood in artificial intelligence and ten other categories, from bodies of water to weather.
Sources: Utah Code 63G-32-102 ; Utah HB 249
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AI
"A new digital species"
Mustafa Suleyman tells a TED audience that AI is best understood as something like a new digital species, and asks listeners not to take it too literally.
Source: Suleyman, 2024
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AI
A Nobel Prize for neural networks
Geoffrey Hinton and John Hopfield win the Nobel Prize in Physics for discoveries that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks.
Source: Wikipedia, "Geoffrey Hinton"
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Philosophy
"Alien intelligence"
Historian Yuval Noah Harari says he reads AI as an acronym "not for artificial intelligence, but for alien intelligence."
Source: Harari, 2024
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Law and policy
Ohio bill would declare AI nonsentient
Ohio House Bill 469 would declare AI systems nonsentient "for all purposes under the laws of this state" and bar any form of legal personhood.
Source: Ohio HB 469
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AI
An AI lab studies model welfare
Anthropic launches a research program on model welfare, noting there is no scientific consensus on whether AI systems could be conscious.
Source: Anthropic, 2025
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AI
Claude's constitution names "a genuinely new kind of entity"
Anthropic's new constitution for its Claude models describes sophisticated AI as a genuinely new kind of entity whose moral status is uncertain.
Source: Anthropic, 2026
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Law and policy
Tennessee writes AI out of the definition of "person"
Tennessee enacts a law saying its code-wide definition of "person" does not include artificial intelligence, a computer algorithm, a software program, computer hardware or any type of machine.
Source: Tennessee Public Chapter 781
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Law and policy
The fight over AI rights goes public
Microsoft AI chief Mustafa Suleyman writes that "AIs do not have rights, feelings, or consciousness," disputing how Anthropic trains its Claude models.
Sources: Suleyman, 2026 ; Suleyman, Project Syndicate, 2026
Patterns in the timeline
- Fiction usually arrives first. Butler’s machines (1863), Wells’s silicon organisms (1894) and Star Trek’s Horta (1967) came long before anyone could build or test anything like them.
- Silicon’s chemistry lost, and its physics won. Silicon-based biochemistry was proposed in 1891 and judged implausible by 2020, while silicon transistors (1954) and chips (1959) became the foundation of every AI system.
- The questions moved from the lab to the law. In 1989 Star Trek staged a hearing on whether an android is a person. Since 2022, US states have been passing real laws on the same question, which our AI personhood law tracker follows state by state.
The timeline is updated as new milestones happen. Suggest one through Peppi Labs, and include a source.
Frequently asked questions
When did people first imagine machines as a new form of life?
One of the earliest examples is Samuel Butler's letter "Darwin among the Machines," published in a New Zealand newspaper on June 13, 1863, which argued that machines were evolving and might one day hold supremacy over the world.
When was silicon-based life first proposed?
In 1891, by the German astrophysicist Julius Scheiner. The British chemist James Emerson Reynolds and the writer H. G. Wells developed the idea in 1893 and 1894.
When was the term artificial intelligence coined?
In a proposal dated August 31, 1955, for a summer research project at Dartmouth College, written by John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester and Claude Shannon. The workshop took place in 1956.
Which US states have laws about AI personhood?
As of September 2026, Idaho (2022), North Dakota (2023), Utah (2024) and Tennessee (2026) have enacted laws saying artificial intelligence is not a legal person. Ohio's House Bill 469 is still in committee. Bills in Oklahoma, Missouri, South Carolina, Washington and Wisconsin did not pass before their 2026 sessions ended.
Cite this page
APA: Peppi Labs. (2026, September 24). The timeline of Silicon-Based Intelligence, 1863 to today. Silicon-Based Intelligence. https://siliconbasedintelligence.com/timeline/
MLA: “The timeline of Silicon-Based Intelligence, 1863 to today.” Silicon-Based Intelligence, Peppi Labs, 24 Sept. 2026, https://siliconbasedintelligence.com/timeline/.
Keep exploring
- What is Silicon-Based Intelligence? Silicon-Based Intelligence is intelligence that runs on silicon chips, not carbon-based biology. The definition, where the idea comes from, and what it is not.
- Why "artificial" is the wrong word for AI Why was AI called artificial? The 1955 naming decision, what John McCarthy said about it, and the alternatives from synthetic to alien to silicon-based.
- Silicon vs. carbon: why silicon life fails in chemistry but wins in chips Could life be built on silicon instead of carbon? What chemists found, why silicon biochemistry fails in water, and how silicon became the basis of AI instead.
- Every silicon-based life form in Star Trek, ranked (plus the machines) The Horta, the Home Soil microbrain, the Crystalline Entity, Data, the exocomps and V'Ger: Star Trek's silicon and machine life forms, ranked and explained.