Michael Levin

If we knew how to tell cells what to build, all of those things go away.

So those things go away and the positive feedback spiral of economic costs where all of the advances are increasingly more heroic and expensive interventions of a sinking ship when you're like 90 and so on, right?

All of that goes away because basically instead of trying to fix you up as you degrade, you –

you progressively regenerate, you know, you apply the regenerative medicine early before things degrade.

So I think that that'll have massive economic impacts over what we're trying to do now, which is not at all, you know, sustainable.

And that's what I hope.

I hope that we get... So to me, yes, the xenobots will be doing useful things, cleaning up the environment, cleaning out, you know, your joints and all that kind of stuff.

But more important than that, I think we can use...

these uh synthetic systems to try to understand to to to develop a science of detecting and manipulating the goals of collective intelligences of cells specifically for regenerative medicine and then sort of beyond that if we you know sort of think further beyond that what i hope is that kind of like what you said all of this drives a reconsideration of how we formulate um ethical norms because this old school so so so in the olden days what you could do is

As you were confronted with something new, you could tap on it, right?

And if you heard a metallic clanging sound, you'd said, ah, fine, right?

So you could conclude it was made in a factory.

I can take it apart.

I can do whatever, right?

If you did that and you got sort of a squishy kind of warm sensation, you'd say, ah, I need to be more or less nice to it and whatever.

That's not going to be feasible.

It was never really feasible, but it was good enough because we didn't know any better.

That needs to go.

And I think that...

By breaking down those artificial barriers, someday we can try to build a system of ethical norms that does not rely on these completely contingent facts of our earthly history, but on something much, much deeper that really takes agency and the capacity to suffer and all that takes that seriously.