Michael Levin

So in vitro, if you plate some neurons and you put a big scratch through it so you damage them, anthrobots can sit down and they will spontaneously, without us having to teach them to do it, they will spontaneously try to knit the neurons across.

So this is an anthrobot.

So often when I give talks about this, I show people this video and I say, what do you think this is?

And people will say, well, it looks like some primitive organism you got from the bottom of a pond somewhere.

And I'll say, well, what do you think the genome would look like?

And is it, well, the genome would look like some primitive creature, right?

If you sequence that thing, you'll get a hundred percent homo sapiens.

And that doesn't look like any stage of normal human development.

It doesn't act like any stage of human development.

It has the ability to move around.

It has, as I said, over 9,000 differential gene expressions.

Also, interestingly, it is younger than the cells that it comes from.

So it actually has the ability to roll back its age.

And we could talk about that and what the implications of that are.

But to go back to your original question, what we're doing with these kinds of systems.

We're trying to talk to it.

That's exactly right.

And not just to this, we're trying to talk to molecular networks.

So we found a couple of years ago, we found that gene regulatory networks, nevermind the cells, but the molecular pathways inside of cells can have several different kinds of learning, including Pavlovian conditioning.

And what we're doing now is trying to talk to it.