The Anthrobots: a new living entity with much to teach us
thoughtforms.life
thoughtforms.life
The various observed categories of behavior are obviously attributable to the distribution of cilia along the surface of the anthrobot -- which push it around unevenly. Sometimes in circles, or sometimes in a straight line when the forces are balanced.
Sure, down the line we will be able to do some really crazy stuff by bioengineering robots like this. But not anytime soon if we're still stuck at this phase.
* they have discrete state transitions, regardless of cillia. I'm glad they didn't jump to "behavior", but it doesn't appear random
* The bit about enabling healing by possibly (accidentally?) being a communication mechanism is really interesting. Might be that nerves just don't grow b/c they don't they they're supposed to??
But yeah - it's the beginning. Hype over possibilities hinted at in the first few observations are basically all you can get at early stage R&D, and it's great for generating grant funding. Hard to say it's not worth looking at, I think? IANABiologist. IAMARoboticist.
What do you mean by this? I'd appreciate jvanderbot having another go at typing out their thought.
Decades ago I thought for sure by now we would be harnessing the DNA to express chitin and strands of cellulose into structural forms to start replacing the ubiquitous poison petrochemical plastics that we're still dumping in massive amounts into toxic waste dumps around the world.
We're still not there yet 8-/ So the subject at least offers some advance in understanding biological processes.
But the biggest disappointment of the article was in the author's emphasis of the importance of the name of the thing.
While the name might have a big effect in the intensity of the "neato" response in a lay audience. I seriously doubt it would have much effect at all on specialists in the field. They're gonna follow the results, not the names.
Then the author doubles down at the end with a nice little bible story about the big invisible swinging dick in outer space, and how HE got Adam to name the animals.
Is the author seriously advocating this prehistoric creation myth? If so, that's pathetic.
As for my own advocacy, I've always taken the opposite position regarding what happens when we apply a name. I always told my son when he was a small child, and learning a lot of words, that once we learn a name for a thing, it becomes invisible to us.
As soon as our brain can identify something that we know a name for, we instantly slap that label on the thing and we never see another detail of it's actual existence. That kind of covering up endless layers of detail is essential to prevent being bogged down in the real world, but it's also a major inhibitor to getting over stereotypes and uncovering new facts.
Yeah, that strikes me as one of those fundamental conundrums that crops up sometimes. A little bit like the exploration/exploitation tradeoff or something. Naming things is "bad" in that it hides the details and ends the need to pay attention to those details and sort of locks the concept in a stasis a bit. But OTOH, naming thing is "good" exactly because it hides the details and allows us to use the concept more freely. The whole "design patterns" notion in software development seems to encapsulate this idea.
It's sometimes surprising to me we have such a deeply ingrained way of thinking about cells in biology, maybe that's what the authors are trying to challenge??? From reading this, I got the impression we tend to think of cells as having one "natural" or "proper" function? Lung cells are "supposed to" just line airways and wave their cilia to move mucus? To me this is a bit like if we insisted that a Roomba's "natural" state was only the straight lines it makes if on a bowling alley, and viewed its more complex navigation patterns in a living room as somehow "unexpected" or "unnatural." To me it's more logicaly that cells like any complex system, will express different behaviors in different environments?