Michael Levin

I don't think necessarily it's optimizing for intelligence or fairness or any of that stuff.

This is natural.

Yeah, exactly.

Because it comes from an old worldview where you could assume that whatever is natural, that that's probably for the best.

And I think we're long out of that Garden of Eden kind of view.

So I think we can do better.

And we have to, right?

Natural just isn't great for a lot of life forms.

Yeah, on a practical level, what I really hope to do is to gain enough of an understanding of the embodied intelligence of the organs and tissues such that we can achieve a radically different regenerative medicine so that we can say, basically, and I think about it as, you know, in terms of like, okay, can you, what's the, what's the,

What's the goal kind of end game for this whole thing?

To me, the end game is something that you would call an anatomical compiler.

So the idea is you would sit down in front of the computer and you would draw the body or the organ that you wanted.

Not molecular details, but like, here, this is what I want.

I want a six-legged frog with a propeller on top, or I want a heart that looks like this, or I want a leg that looks like this.

And what it would do, if we knew what we were doing, is...

put out, convert that anatomical description into a set of stimuli that would have to be given to cells to convince them to build exactly that thing, right?

I probably won't live to see it, but I think it's achievable.

And I think with that, if we can have that, then that is basically the solution to all of medicine except for infectious disease.

So birth defects, right?

Traumatic injury, cancer, aging, degenerative disease.