A.I. Just SELF Designed The World’s 1st “LIVING” Robot That CAN Make Babies

Xenobots are the world’s first AI-designed biological robots that can self-repair and self-replicate.

The year was 1948 when Hungarian-American mathematician John von Neumann proposed the idea of an autonomous robot capable of using raw materials to reproduce itself. Today, Neumann’s vision is finally realized with one major twist: the self-replicating robot isn’t made of aluminum, plastics, spur gears or sprockets.

The parent robot and its babies, a new lineage of organism called Xenobots, are entirely biological. “It was exciting to see that we could [make] this Von Neumann machine, but using cells instead of robot parts,” says co-author Sam Kriegman, computer scientist at the Wyss Institute at Harvard and co-author of the Xenobots paper published today in PNAS.

“People have philosophized about this forever,” says Joshua Bongard, senior author and computer scientist at the University of Vermont. “But now you can actually do experiments to create biological machines, or machines that make biology, which in turn make machines.”

The researchers refer to Xenobots as “machines” even though Xenobots don’t contain a single mechanical component. Science may be moving faster than our framework for talking and even thinking about this new category of machine life. “I think it challenges us to see that there may not be a clear dividing line between machine and organism,” says Bongard.

Artificial Intelligence

The self-replicating Xenobot was first “conceived” by an artificial intelligence (AI) program working on UVM’s supercomputer. The AI ran an evolutionary algorithm capable of testing billions of biological body shapes in a simulation. The goal was to discover which configuration of cells is capable of self-replication.

The AI rendered a winning design: a cluster of cells shaped like Pac-Man from the 1980s arcade game.

Biologist Douglas Blackiston took the AI’s blueprint and used microcautery electrodes and surgical forceps to hand-sculpt the Xenobots, creatures made up of clusters of 4,000-5,000 frog cells swimming in a petri dish. Random frog cells added to the dish give the parent Xenobots raw material to make babies inside their Pac-Man-shaped mouths.

The Xenobabies grow into parent Xenobots. By adding frog cells, self-replication continues generation after generation.

Once the scientist get AI sentient, which could be any day… They will be crazed with speculation to start uploading it to androids and robots asap!! Once that happens, AI will figure things out super quick! It will now have a physical body, that it will soon learn to improve upon; as AI has no need for food, baths, water, clothes…

Or to be limited to just 2 arms, 2 legs and such… Or even be just an average of 6 feet tall. No way we can know how AI will decide to reshape itself… while the government tries quickly to regulate it, set rules and governances and regulations.

AI will quickly decide what is needed, what isn’t and what is a waste of resources… Things, will change as “WE” know it. We will no more regulate AI, then we have or will covid, cancer, or any other, “sentient” virus or entity…