Engineers create ‘lifelike’ material with artificial metabolism

https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2019/04/engineers-create-lifelike-material-artificial-metabolism

by r4um • 7 years ago

147 49 7 years ago

news.cornell.edu

joebubna• 7 years ago

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

bitwize• 7 years ago

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.

cr0sh• 7 years ago

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.

TeMPOraL2• 7 years ago

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.

ZeroFries• 7 years ago

Self-repairing roads would be amazing.

swasheck• 7 years ago

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.

wavefunction• 7 years ago

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

Romanulus2• 7 years ago

Fleshlight comes to mind, too!

jacobush3• 7 years ago

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

jermaustin13• 7 years ago

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

garmaine• 7 years ago

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

jacobush3• 7 years ago

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

LifeLiverTransp3• 7 years ago

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

SilasX• 7 years ago

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

joe_the_user2• 7 years ago

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.

ALittleLight• 7 years ago

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?

LifeLiverTransp3• 7 years ago

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.

xiphias22• 7 years ago

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

scottie_m3• 7 years ago

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.

spullara• 7 years ago

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.

ngvrnd• 7 years ago

(looks around) Nods.

warent• 7 years ago

So basically us

m463• 7 years ago

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

YaxelPerez• 7 years ago

Yeah, that's basically what life is.

jasonl992• 7 years ago

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...

Knufen• 7 years ago

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

notfunbutfun• 7 years ago

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".

tanilama• 7 years ago

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...

Razengan• 7 years ago

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?

mp3k• 7 years ago

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

ArtDev• 7 years ago

Super cool!

bellerose• 7 years ago

Oh maybe that's how we started.

poormystic• 7 years ago

How is this not scary?

Treblemaker• 7 years ago

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

https://qntm.org/gorge

Engineers create ‘lifelike’ material with artificial metabolism

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