AI has developed the world's first living robot capable of bearing children.

Xenobots are the world's first biological robots that artificial intelligence can repair and reproduce on its own.

It was in 1948 that Hungarian-American mathematician John von Neumann proposed the idea of ​​an autonomous robot that could replicate itself using raw materials. Today, Neumann's vision has finally come true with one important change. Self-replicating robots are not made of aluminum, plastic, spur gears or sprockets. A new family of organisms called xenobots, parent robots and their children, are completely biological. "You can [build] this von Neumann machine, but it was interesting to see that you could use cells instead of robotic parts," says co-author Sam Krigman, a computer scientist at the Harvard Weiss Institute  and co-author of the Xenobots paper. said. Published on PNAS today. “People have always been philosophical about this,” said Joshua Bongard, University of Vermont lead author and computer scientist. “But now we can experiment with actually building biological machines.

This can be confusing. Researchers commonly refer to xenobots as “machines,” but xenobots contain no mechanical components. We can move faster than our molds until we talk and think about  machine life, "I think we're starting to find that there might not be a clear  line between the machine and the body," says Bongard.

Artificial Intelligence

The self-replicating Xenobot was first "thought out" by an artificial intelligence (AI) program running on a UVM supercomputer.  AI has released an evolutionary algorithm that can test billions of biological body shapes in simulations. The goal was to find out which components of the cell are capable of self-replication. AI created a successful design, a cluster of cells shaped like PacMan from an arcade game in the 1980s.

Biologist Douglas Blackiston manually sculpted a xenobot, a creature composed of clusters of 4,0005,000 frog cells floating in a Petri dish, using microcauterizing electrodes and surgical forceps according to an AI scheme. Random Frogs Added to Dish We provide parent xenobots with raw materials to create babies in PacMans shaped mouths. Xenobaby transforms into Xenobot parents. When frog cells are added, self-reproduction continues through generations. Sculpting stem cells into specific shapes is "programming" that directs cell clusters to develop in specific ways. Forming clusters of frog cells in this particular configuration is programmed to transform into a new self-replicating organism. “Designing life or designing robots is AI,” says Blackiston. "These are things outside the realm of [natural] selection."

A New Definition of Intelligence

Robots composed of traditional robotic parts that perform reasonably well in a controlled environment often fail in the real world. "It's unpredictable and everything messes up when you move around the world," says Krigman, delighted with the possibility of using  materials for robots with built-in bio-intelligence. “Doug came up with the idea of ​​making a robot out of biological materials. , says Krigman. “You can get this information for free. And we went to the race." When asked if Xenobots were smart, Blackkeystone questioned. Of the team's two computer scientists and two biologists, Blackiston could be implemented at the design and programming level, but  in real Xenobots.

We are more familiar with the term Xenobots as programmed engineering organisms with intelligible intelligence: “I think they are irrational,” says Blackiston, although he agrees with the rest of the team that their work defies scientific definition. “[Justice] is disappearing with these technologies,” Bongard said. “Xenobots are a product of AI, and AI itself helps to subvert our standard definition of intelligence.”

Intelligent Design

Definitions aside, Blackiston believes that society will have to face the many  applications and implications of this new technology. For example, the problem of artificial intelligence developing parts for humans. “What if  AI jumps into business and discovers that it can design  better minds than  evolution has given us?” Ask Blackiston, who believes that artificial intelligence can provide a blueprint for creating organs that are superior to  current models. “I think  in the next 1015 these problems will appear across the healthcare and environmental sectors.”