Michael Levin

There's never been selection to be a good xenobot.

These cells find themselves in the new environment.

In 48 hours, they figure out how to be an entirely different

proto-organism with new capacities like kinematic self-replication.

That's not how frogs or tadpoles replicate.

We've made it impossible for them to replicate their normal way.

Within a couple of days, these guys find a new way of doing it that's not done anywhere else in the biosphere.

So a xenobot is a self-assembling little proto-organism.

It's also a biological robot.

Those things are not distinct.

It's a member of both classes.

At this point, most of it is biology because what we're doing is we're discovering natural behaviors of the cells and also of the cell collectives.

Now, one of the really important parts of this was that we're working together with Josh Bongard's group at University of Vermont.

They're computer scientists, do AI research.

And they've basically been able to use an evolutionary, a simulated evolution approach to ask, how can we manipulate these cells, give them signals, not rewire their DNA, so not hardware, but experience signals.

So can we remove some cells?

Can we add some cells?

Can we poke them in different ways to get them to do other things?

So in the future, there's going to be, you know, we're now, and this is future unpublished work, but we're doing all sorts of interesting ways to reprogram them to new behaviors.

But before you can start to reprogram these things, you have to understand what their innate capacities are.