Michael Levin

But they're alien in a couple of important ways.

One is the space they live in is very hard for us to imagine.

What space do they live in?

Well...

your body, your body cells, long before we had a brain that was good for navigating three-dimensional space, was navigating the space of anatomical possibilities.

It was going from, you start as an egg and you have to become, you know, a snake or, you know, a giraffe or whatever, or a human, whatever, whatever we're going to be.

And I specifically am telling you that

This general idea when people model that with kind of cellular automata type of ideas, this open loop kind of thing where, well, everything just follows local rules and eventually there's complexity and here you go, now you've got a giraffe or a human.

I'm specifically telling you that that model is totally insufficient to grasp what's actually going on.

What's actually going on, and there have been many, many experiments on this,

is that the system is navigating a space.

It is navigating a space of anatomical possibilities.

If you try to block where it's going, it will try to get around you.

If you try to challenge it with things it's never seen before, it will try to come up with a solution.

If you really defeat its ability to do that, which you can, they're not infinitely intelligent, so you can defeat them, you will either get birth defects or you will get creative problem solving, such as what you're seeing here with Xenobots and Anthrobots.

If you can't be a human,

you'll find another way to be in.

You can be an anthropod, for example, or you'll be something else.

The will thing, let's put that aside because that's it.

Well, it's fine.