This from the PI (below); I'm afraid I'm starting to "lose the plot" on how researchers justify the value of controversial work to ethics committees & grant disbursers.

'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...

As much as I long for the day I get to see the world and myself be assimilated into grey gooey unity, the whole gray goo scenario is terribly implausible for the same reason why it has never happened despite having self replicating machines on earth for at least 3 billion years: it turns out that performing any kind of abrasion at that scale requires a shit tonne of energy, which entails an even larger shit tonne of heat.

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.