A group of mad scientists at the University of Vermont, Tufts University and Harvard University’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering have created synthetic lifeforms that are designed by computers and built by combining together different biological tissues.
Known as Xenobots, these programmable organic machine beings can heal themselves and even reproduce.
The Xenobots are not your traditional robot made of bolts and nuts. The scientists took cells from frog embryos and repurposed them into entirely new life-forms, in a way not seen in plants and animals.
Scientists hope they can use these organic bots to do cool things like search for radioactive contamination, breakdown and collect plastic pollution in our oceans and help people live longer by traveling through arteries to scrape out plaque that cause heart disease.
But is this really all rainbows and sunshine or is this just a another step closer to realizing our long predicted future of a world dominated by super intelligent machines?
It remains to be seen whether that future is closer to The Terminator, with human-like robotic cyborgs intent on killing off the human race – or if it will be closer to The Matrix, where we are all enslaved inside an A.I. created virtual reality. I tend to lean toward a Matrix style future and Mark Zuckerberg’s new Metaverse being a nice springboard to thrust us into this future.
In either case this could be an ominous foretelling of our future, being enslaved by hyper-intelligent Xenobots if and when they evolve!