Engineers create ‘lifelike’ material with artificial metabolism | Hacker News Reader

Engineers create ‘lifelike’ material with artificial metabolism

news.cornell.edu

147 pointsr4um51 comments

My current presumption is that if we encounter alien "life" it will actually be some self-replicating system that just spread itself everywhere, the original creators long forgotten.

(looks around) Nods.

So basically us

or zebra mussels, or jellyfish, or the hawaiian mongoose, or dandilions, or ...

Yeah, that's basically what life is.

Your comment totally reminds me of an article Tim Urban wrote in 2015 about the dangers of AI (Mr. Urban, if you are around these parts I absolutely love your writing!!).

Within that article he describes "a 15-person startup company called Robotica has the stated mission of “Developing innovative Artificial Intelligence tools that allow humans to live more and work less.” It does not end well.

https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revol...

Do you remember the actual article? I can't find it and I love a good short story.

It's actually towards the middle of the article I linked (in italics). Search for "So what ARE they worried about? I wrote a little story to show you"

I'm surprised no one mentioned "The Invincible" by Stanislaw Lem. Basic idea of the story is exactly what you're describing, "self-replicating system", with "creators long forgotten".

I recommend this novel, among with many others ("Fiasco", "Eden" and, of course, "Solaris"), for anyone who likes good sci-fi about "first contact".

That is like a description of life on earth as well.

Life on earth has so far been successful in sustaining its presence on this small planet for almost 4B years right now...

Yes. If we build some AI robots that can manufacture others like themselves from raw materials, and can learn and teach each other, and we sprinkle some of them on an uninhabited planet, where they eventually develop a modicum of self-sustaining civilization of their own, by what criteria would they not be considered life?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey_goo

This article had me thinking about self-repairing clothing or ships with living hulls.

I thought of synthetic fur that looks like real fur and is just as soft and warm, but doesn't involve killing animals. That and T800 skin.

Rather than just synthetic fur - imagine a coat (furry or not) that is "alive" and generates it's own heat to keep you warm. Maybe it "feeds" on your sweat and dead skin cells? Or you feed it at night in some manner?

Every time I see one of these articles on "bio-robotics" or whatever you want to call them, I always think back to sci-fi like Dune (Axlotl "technology") and/or Blade Runner (replicants, artificial eyes, etc); a future where the line between the artificial and the natural is very, very blurry.

Sweat happens when your body needs to remove excess heat, so using it to heat your body back (even if thermodynamics allowed for it) would be... kind of counterproductive. But being able to feed it with something overnight and have it slowly radiate out the heat would be a nice thing for winter months. Beats electric heating.

As long as this new synthetic fur is cheaper than the real thing... If I'm to believe a random outrage post I've seen on Facebook, apparently real fur is cheaper at scale than synthetic, so some companies ended up selling clothes from real fur but advertised them as synthetic, to cash in on the extra money you can get from people caring about animal suffering.

I would imagine it really depends on the fur. No doubt a squirrel fur product can be very cheap, while lion fire is going to be on the pricey side.

Self-repairing roads would be amazing.

I wonder what the economic impact to local economies would be if we could be rid of the bribes, cronyism, and nepotism that goes into civil maintenance.

I know my local tire shop would be out of business. I go through an average of 1 tire each month from potholes, and a bent rim at least twice per year.

That's insane. What state are you in?

I live in Rockland County, NY. Known for 2 things, potholes from the endless road work, and now measles!

Depending on home the road is deriving the matter needed to repair itself.

Fleshlight comes to mind, too!

What, no? Do you mean something I don't understand? Or are the downvotes coming down to rain on your comment?

They all upvote down here, friend!

Why does nobody fear grey goo? Runaway highly efficient self-repairing materials are the stuff of nightmares?

Do they have a culture of "know how to disrupt the metabolism before you leave it to grow on its own"?

Because self-organization/self-reproduction is a hard problem that living things have been imperfectly trying to solve for millions of years without the creation "grey goo"?

I mean, for a self-reproducing entity, energy is still going to be a limit on motion and energy isn't easily available in the natural environment. All the potential sources of energy require a particular chemical path to be transformed into usable energy and just constructing an entity capable of reproducing itself given specific materials and energy doesn't give you this.

Flight is a hard problem that living organisms have been working on for millions of years, yet human engineered systems fly higher, faster, and further. How do you know that human engineered systems can't also be much better at self replication and hence create grey goo?

I don't necessarily think that human-engineered gray goo is impossible. But the context is whether gray goo is going to be created accidentally and that seems unlikely.

Just self-reproduction is a different problem than breaking down X energy source and moreover, the breakdown of each given source of chemical energy is a different and hard problem (the breakdown of cellulose by bacteria took a long time to evolve, for example). So creating a "breaks down anything" micro-organism (or nanite or whatever) merely by doing a bit of haphazard DNA manipulation doesn't seem like a big danger.

If you had human who grasped the broader principles behind micro-engineering and wanted gray-goo, well, then you'd have reason to worry. There's little evidence of this, however.

Flight by itself isn't something that nature has developed. It has developed self-replicating beings that can fly. Humans are still a long way off self-replicating aircraft.

Imagine a airborne spirondella version, designed to float by self-produced methan. The sky would turn dark-green with there clouds, and ocassionally burn.

We already have a chemical better version of photosynthesis in the labs - if i remember correctly about 3x as effective. A simple runaway assembler with snythetic photosynthesis like a lichen would overgrow natural organisms quite fast.

Because they are not smart. Intelligence often wins over simple aggressive behaviour. Also this is why AI is so scary.

For most of history, and increasingly today the simple aggressive behavior of bacteria, viruses and fungi was uncontested. For all of our intelligence, they still win a lot, and our best efforts are becoming less effective as they adapt. They don’t even have nervous systems, but numbers and a fast reproductive cycle are a bitch. See also: a colony of army ants killing everything in front of them.

I don't see it happening. In the past they were able to kill more than 50% of humanity. I don't believe something similar will adapt by itself again. We have internet, full body suits, a lot of technology to defend against them.

Sure, and yet mosquitoes alone infect over 700m people a year with various diseases, and rack up more than a million deaths each year. I find the Internet is surprisingly ineffective against malaria or dengue too. It’s also true that few people can or would wear a full body suit all day, every day. For god’s sake, we can’t even get everyone to wear a condom, never mind biohazard suits.

Still I respect your optimism, however unfounded it seems to me. I think the next really nasty flu will probably disabuse you of it, but I hope I’m wrong.

He said 50% of humanity, while a million people is a large number to us it’s nowhere near 50% of humanity.

Oh maybe that's how we started.

"That's the first lesson in basic nanotechnology. First, program the off switch. Everybody knows that."

https://qntm.org/gorge

I guess if the robots don't overthrow us, maybe the life-like bio-bots, might?

Why worry about that when actually living bio-bots haven’t?

Oh but they largely did throughout history. It's only in recent times we have been able to (barely) counter that with democracy.

Democracy slowed bacterial growth? Sounds cool.

I took the biobots to refer to us humans...

Super cool!

How is this not scary?

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