How to understand new encounters between the living and the technological? Exemplary of such new encounters are the biotechnological creations of synthetic biology, where life and technology are increasingly intertwined in complex and intimate ways. This developing biotechnological field frames its novel entities as ‘artificial life’, ‘living technology’, and ‘biohybrid systems’. While synthetic biology too easily uses machine metaphors and technological frames for living entities, traditional philosophical frameworks also risk ontological reductionism in their efforts to understand life and technology in relation to each other. In contrast, Gilbert Simondon’s theory of individuation helps to understand the similarities between life and technology without reducing life forms to machines and without conflating technological objects with living systems. The aim of this article is twofold: first, to shed light on the relationship between life and technology, and second, to examine the emergence of new borderline cases resulting from synthetic biology, all with the help of the theory of individuation. Our hypothesis is that individuation facilitates our understanding of these new encounters between living beings and technologies, and provides conceptual clarity to prevailing dualisms such as life and technology, artificial and natural. We will develop Simondon’s theory into a framework and apply it to the case of synthetic biology, thus opening up the possibility that individuation can also help us to think about future encounters between life and technology.

如何理解生活与技术之间的新相遇？这种新相遇的典范是合成生物学的生物技术创造，其中生命和技术越来越多地以复杂和亲密的方式交织在一起。这个不断发展的生物技术领域将其新实体定义为“人工生命”、“生物技术”和“生物混合系统”。虽然合成生物学太容易使用机器隐喻和技术框架来描述生物实体，但传统的哲学框架在努力理解生命和技术之间的关系时也冒着本体论还原论的风险。相比之下，吉尔伯特·西蒙登 （Gilbert Simondon） 的个体化理论有助于理解生命和技术之间的相似性，而不会将生命形式简化为机器，也不会将技术对象与生命系统混为一谈。本文的目的有两个：首先，阐明生命与技术之间的关系，其次，在个体化理论的帮助下，研究合成生物学产生的新边缘案例的出现。我们的假设是，个体化有助于我们理解生物和技术之间的这些新相遇，并为生命和技术、人工和自然等流行的二元论提供了概念上的清晰度。我们将把 Simondon 的理论发展成一个框架，并将其应用于合成生物学的案例，从而开辟了个体化也可以帮助我们思考生命与技术之间未来相遇的可能性。