"“This is profound,” says Levin. “These cells have the genome of a frog, but, freed from becoming tadpoles, they use their collective intelligence, a plasticity, to do something astounding.” In earlier experiments, the scientists were amazed that Xenobots could be designed to achieve simple tasks. Now they are stunned that these biological objects—a computer-designed collection of cells — will spontaneously replicate. “We have the full, unaltered frog genome,” says Levin, “but it gave no hint that these cells can work together on this new task,” of gathering and then compressing separated cells into working self-copies."
Reminds me of people having pet axolotls and then finding out that they glow in the dark because their ancestor was used in some research way back and were inserted with that gene.
I guess if the worst case scenario does not happen ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_goo ) there will be some health applications with targeting certain types of cells/viruses/etc.
Very interesting technology! I’d be curious to see the commercial applications down the line too, not so curious about the potential hyper targeted invisible weaponry possibilities though
As much as I long for the day I get to see the world and myself be assimilated into grey gooey unity, the whole gray goo scenario is terribly implausible for the same reason why it has never happened despite having self replicating machines on earth for at least 3 billion years: it turns out that performing any kind of abrasion at that scale requires a shit tonne of energy, which entails an even larger shit tonne of heat.
Any grey goo candidates will rapidly vaporise themselves into cinders, even assuming they somehow manage to acquire the bordering-on-nuclear levels of energy density.
In reality, a crack team of specialised machines will always beat a sea of generics anyway so any swarm of artificial self replicators will inevitably balloon into a fully blown parallel ecology long before it acquired the bulk for Armagooden.
This from the PI (below); I'm afraid I'm starting to "lose the plot" on how researchers justify the value of controversial work to ethics committees & grant disbursers.
'Bongard points to the COVID epidemic and the hunt for a vaccine. “The speed at which we can produce solutions matters deeply. If we can develop technologies, learning from Xenobots, where we can quickly tell the AI,: ‘We need a biological tool that does X and Y and suppresses Z,’ —that could be very beneficial. Today, that takes an exceedingly long time.” The team aims to accelerate how quickly people can go from identifying a problem to generating solutions—"like deploying living machines to pull microplastics out of waterways or build new medicines,” Bongard says.
“We need to create technological solutions that grow at the same rate as the challenges we face,” Bongard says. '
These don't reproduce in that way though. They require existing skin cells that they then corrall into balls akin to themselves. Even if grey goo was a serious existential risk (it isn't because the classic doomsday scenario ignores energy density and heat dissipation as factors), this is not really talking about the same mechanism.
I'd already be happy with frogobots washing my dishes for me. But I could never be sure they don't start eating my kitchen instead. Anyway, I'd call that species “rana experimentalis frivole” instead of the PR gimmick “xenobot”.
What could possibly go wrong here?