
Engineers create ‘lifelike’ material with artificial metabolism - r4um
https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2019/04/engineers-create-lifelike-material-artificial-metabolism
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spullara
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.

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jasonl99
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...](https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-
revolution-2.html)

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

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jasonl99
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"

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mp3k
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey_goo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey_goo)

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

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bitwize
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.

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cr0sh
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.

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TeMPOraL
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.

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

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joe_the_user
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.

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ALittleLight
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?

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MRD85
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.

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

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bellerose
Oh maybe that's how we started.

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

[https://qntm.org/gorge](https://qntm.org/gorge)

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jermaustin1
I guess if the robots don't overthrow us, maybe the life-like bio-bots, might?

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

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

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pazimzadeh
Democracy slowed bacterial growth? Sounds cool.

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

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ArtDev
Super cool!

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poormystic
How is this not scary?

