Team builds first living robots–that can reproduce
Living robot is a terrible term. If I understand correctly, Xenobots are bits of organic matter that use little spaghetti legs to swim around. So the computer made one that looks like a cheese puff and somehow clumping them together is defined as reproduction? Maybe I'm missing something but it doesn't seem that exciting.
I found the juxtaposition of the following two quotes to be thought provoking at the very least:
> "It’s very non-intuitive. It looks very simple, but it’s not something a human engineer would come up with."
and
> These millimeter-sized living machines, entirely contained in a laboratory, easily extinguished, and vetted by federal, state and institutional ethics experts, “are not what keep me awake at night. (...)” says UVM’s Bongard. “This is an ideal system in which to study self-replicating systems. We have a moral imperative to understand the conditions under which we can control it, direct it, douse it, exaggerate it.”
Can someone help me understand what's going on here? The article throws around lost of nonsense, but doesn't answer the basic stuff.
From https://www.pnas.org/content/117/4/1853?ijkey=c53500b4c64445..., they designed (via a genetic algorithm, for some reason) the cheese puffs.
Then created the real cheese puffs from real frog stem cells:
> Pluripotent stem cells are first harvested from blastula stage Xenopus laevis embryos, dissociated, and pooled to achieve the desired number of cells. Following an incubation period, the aggregated tissue is then manually shaped by subtraction using a combination of microsurgery forceps and a 13-ÎĽm wire tip cautery electrode, producing a biological approximation of the simulated design.
From https://www.pnas.org/content/118/49/e2112672118, they put these hand-made cheese puffs into a sea of more frog stem cells (that naturally already form epidermis spheroids) which through their random movement clump the stem cells, helping them make little epidermis balls?
I don't think this is replication. I think the little cheese balls just randomly (or maybe because they gave them cilia?) move about and clump stem cells together that naturally become epidermis balls and end up looking similar to what they designed.
I for one, welcome our frog-celled robot overlords.
How long would it take before military industrial complex creates Battletoads from this?
To be truly robust they should be able to draw from pretty much any resource in the environment as feedstock for their growth and reproduction.
The images also makes them look a little grey and gooey, so the public will probably latch onto something like "grey goo" as a nickname. What could go wrong?
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Looks like there's a (slightly, at least) less sensational article on this at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29386102.
I immediately thought of gray goo, of course. What’s to stop that from happening here?
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