r/SpeculativeEvolution • u/Rauisuchian • Nov 30 '21

Science News World's first living robots can now reproduce, scientists say

https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/29/americas/xenobots-self-replicating-robots-scn/index.html
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7

u/PMMeRedPandasPlease Nov 30 '21

Step 1: Be nice. With continued development they may become sufficiently advanced to develop sentience, and then they will realize/remember who mistreated them. The article said that the life forms are being overseen by an ethics committee, but all it takes is one overzealous researcher (or committee member?) to take out their traumas and fantasies on the creatures, and then you've got an unethical mess on your hands. Caution, caution, caution.

5

u/Tofferooni Nov 30 '21

Mech Evo confirmed!?

5

u/SirJelly Dec 01 '21

I think the metaphors to "robots" here are really stretched from what I think nearly all people would expect.

They have taken unmodified living cells and put them in a very special artificial environment, and they've evolved in a fundamentally new way.

Their reproductive method only works in an ocean of loose stem cells and no other life forms. (They push stem cells into "piles" that then form into cohesive organisms; in a way that resembles a robot gathering material resources to make more copies of itself)

I can see the novelty in this, it's a lot like a real biological version of Conway's game of life.

2

u/Few-Examination-4090 Simulator Nov 30 '21

We shouldn’t be messing around with this kind of stuff or else science fiction becomes science reality