\section{Discussion}

\subsection{Why this route may precede humanoid machine life}

A humanoid robot integrates perception, locomotion, manipulation, power, and
physical safety, but those achievements do not automatically provide durable
semantic identity or accountable self-modification. Conversely, a server-scale
organism can already interact with a consequential environment: source code,
build systems, package registries, networks, humans, and other machines. It can
observe failures, alter executable organization, and receive new resources.

This suggests an evolutionary order. First construct a large, awkward,
observable organism from existing technical matter. Let its compiler, caches,
logs, gates, and racks remain visible. Learn which semantic and metabolic
loops actually sustain it. Only later compress proven organization into
smaller hardware. Attempting to jump directly to a compact or anthropomorphic
form risks concealing the very continuity and maintenance mechanisms that must
first be understood.

\subsection{The role of commercial success}

A commercially successful Kungfu ecosystem could finance fixed compute,
storage, model access, networking, physical space, and long-duration
experiments. Recursive dogfood could also reduce the human labor needed for
routine maintenance of Kungfu itself. In that sense, commercial profit and
agent capability make the proposed laboratory materially plausible.

They do not make it automatic. A viable experiment still needs explicit
research governance, isolation from production, resource budgets, independent
evaluation, legal review for external effects, and humans who retain
constitutional authority. Revenue supplies metabolism; it is not evidence of
life.

\subsection{Attention rather than absence}

The right autonomy target is not zero human contact. An organism that speaks
with humans, requests resources, reads public information, and responds to
feedback remains connected to its world. The target is that persistence does
not require continuous unrecorded rescue. Human attention should become
intentional interaction, authority, care, and exception handling rather than
hidden glue.

This framing also avoids a false opposition between human control and machine
life. Biological organisms exist within ecologies of dependence. A machine
organism can remain dependent on human-owned power and authority while
possessing meaningful functional continuity and self-maintenance inside that
relationship.

\subsection{Where identity could fail}

The strongest unresolved issue is identity under semantic change. If the
organism changes its Initiative, authority constitution, memory policy, and
organ architecture, at what point is the successor no longer the same subject?
Source ancestry alone is insufficient, and a stable identifier could mask
radical replacement.

The initial engineering answer should be conservative. Declare a small set of
constitutional invariants whose incompatible change creates a descendant or
fork rather than an ordinary successor. Record perspective-dependent identity
claims, require an external admission authority for constitutional changes,
and allow uncertainty to remain visible. Longitudinal experiments may reveal
that some invariants are unnecessary and others missing.

\subsection{Reproduction is deferred}

The proposal focuses on persistence and self-production, not reproduction.
Creating a new subject requires founding identity, direction, authority,
habitat, and resource relations that should not be inferred from copying
software. A future reproductive experiment might allow an existing organism
to propose and provision a descendant, but a qualified copy of its body is not
automatically a new life, and a fork is not automatically the same life.

\subsection{Scientific value even if the thesis fails}

If the survival trials show that the life vocabulary is unhelpful, the
architecture can still improve long-running agent engineering. It yields
auditable work continuity, safer self-modification, reproducible bodies,
qualified memory, model replaceability, and measured human intervention. The
research program is therefore useful even under a negative metaphysical
interpretation.
