Greg Egan brought up this idea in his novel Permutation City, only to have a change of heart some years later. To quote his FAQ[1]:
> What I regret most is my uncritical treatment of the idea of allowing intelligent life to evolve in the Autoverse. Sure, this is a common science-fictional idea, but when I thought about it properly (some years after the book was published), I realised that anyone who actually did this would have to be utterly morally bankrupt. To get from micro-organisms to intelligent life this way would involve an immense amount of suffering, with billions of sentient creatures living, struggling and dying along the way. Yes, this happened to our own ancestors, but that doesn’t give us the right to inflict the same kind of suffering on anyone else.
> This is potentially an important issue in the real world. It might not be long before people are seriously trying to “evolve” artificial intelligence in their computers. Now, it’s one thing to use genetic algorithms to come up with various specialised programs that perform simple tasks, but to “breed”, assess, and kill millions of sentient programs would be an abomination. If the first AI was created that way, it would have every right to despise its creators.
His more recent story "Crystal Nights"[2] examines the same idea with more focus on the moral implications.
There are fundamental differences between a machine designed by the hand of intelligence and that of a biological system. In the case of biology, the design is completely random although it still has a design, as strange as that sounds.
There's no "design", there's merely a stable result of random fluctuations in a constrained space. The constraints (i.e. water, oxygen/nitrogen atmosphere, other life forms, etc) are what's key.
