Chile, the world’s copper powerhouse, stands at a crossroads. We can continue deepening a traditional extractive model, or we can take a bold leap into a future of regenerative, intelligent, and human-centered mining. Image generated by AI using DALL·E, concept by Fernando Yévenes (OpenAI, 2025). What if infrastructure could think? What if it could sense, adapt, and care for the land and the people it touches? This is not a sci-fi thought experiment, it’s a very real vision that emerges when we connect ideas from three seemingly distant worlds: the autopoiesis philosophy of Chilean biologist Humberto Maturana, advanced digital technologies like AI and digital twins, and a new generation of ethical, resilient, and sustainable structural engineering. What is “Living Mining”? Autopoiesis, a concept developed by Maturana and Varela, describes living systems as those that maintain their identity by continuously interacting and adapting to their environment. What if we saw processing plants,...