Xenobots: replicating living robots made from frog cells

Any grey goo candidates will rapidly vaporise themselves into cinders, even assuming they somehow manage to acquire the bordering-on-nuclear levels of energy density.

In reality, a crack team of specialised machines will always beat a sea of generics anyway so any swarm of artificial self replicators will inevitably balloon into a fully blown parallel ecology long before it acquired the bulk for Armagooden.

'Bongard points to the COVID epidemic and the hunt for a vaccine. “The speed at which we can produce solutions matters deeply. If we can develop technologies, learning from Xenobots, where we can quickly tell the AI,: ‘We need a biological tool that does X and Y and suppresses Z,’ —that could be very beneficial. Today, that takes an exceedingly long time.” The team aims to accelerate how quickly people can go from identifying a problem to generating solutions—"like deploying living machines to pull microplastics out of waterways or build new medicines,” Bongard says.

“We need to create technological solutions that grow at the same rate as the challenges we face,” Bongard says. '

https://wyss.harvard.edu/news/team-builds-first-living-robot...