Get down.
I think people hear "robot"
and they think Terminator or RoboCop.
Your move, creep.
The idea that you could build a new organism
that has never existed from cells
that does something we've never seen before,
essentially a biological machine,
has really captured the imagination.
If xenobots sound like science fiction brought to life,
it's because they are. They're biological machines
made by humans but designed by computers.
This project offers a new way
to make what you might call a robot
that's very different from existing robotic technologies.
A machine for a new purpose, not to recapitulate biology
or build a heart, but to build something that could do work
for any number of tasks
that you'd use a traditional robot for.
So it's kind of a weird marriage
between robotics and computer science and biology.
These tiny specks seen here
under a microscope are xenobots,
made of about 5,000 living skin cells.
They get their name
from the African clawed frog Xenopus Laevis,
which supplies their cells.
They can't reproduce and they will only live
for around 10 days, feeding on the small platelets
of yolk that fill each of their cells.
Really, this was the first time we thought,
could you take stem cells
and build something from the ground up?
And the idea is really to take these stem cells
very early in development, collect them
and essentially have different types of cells,
like you would different Lego blocks.
Cells already act like little machines,
some contract and expand, others capture material.
By shaping these cells, you create the machine.
So you could imagine a red Lego block is a heart cell
and a green Lego block is a skin cell.
And then really similar to building Legos
where you just sort of start connecting the pieces
from the bottom up, we build our robots in the same way.
We just build cell by cell
until we get to a final shape and form.
Xenobots are designed
and then evolve using artificial intelligence
before they're made.
Sam Kriegman is a graduate student
at the University of Vermont
and designed that computer program.
Unlike every other organism
that has ever existed before on this planet,
the xenobots evolve inside of computer simulations
and the computer simulates the physical world,
but it can do so very rapidly and many worlds at once
and so, it can do evolution in days instead of millennia
and at the end of this evolutionary process,
it prints out a blueprint that tells us
how to build a new organism for some desired task
from essentially scratch from existing biological materials.
The simulated xenobots are subjected
to physics engines similar to those in video games.
The AI assesses how variants will perform and makes changes
according to the tasks they're set.
This is natural selection put on fast-forward
with a computer at the controls.
Evolution on Earth works as a long chain of mutations,
tiny revisions to existing designs, one after the other
over millions or billions of years.
And sometimes, we can speed this up
by selectively breeding crops and livestock and dogs
so that their offspring have desired characteristics.
But it's very unlikely
that you could select from wolves or dogs
anything that you wouldn't call a dog.
But with computers, we can speed up this process.
So we can simulate a billion years of evolution
in a day or in a week on a super computer.
The computer selects its top candidates to build
and only then do humans come back into the picture.
The AI generated blueprints are sent off to Dr. Blackiston
and his wet lab at Tufts University, Massachusetts.
Right, so this
is the fun part, it's a bit like sculpting
and some designs are not possible
to be built biologically currently.
They have features that are too difficult to shape
or construct like right angles, very small gaps.
But we often get five or six excellent designs
that are completely buildable in the lab,
which is where we port everything over into the wet lab
and build them by hand manually.
We then build from the ground up
using those different cells the shape that new one,
and it typically starts as a sphere.
So the cells round off
and make a roughly round shape after 24 hours
and then we go in with a pair of surgical forceps
that we polish with the sharpening stone manually
and also a very small cautery electorate.
We carve away from that sphere the design
and sculpt the final shape
that we would like to match the computer design
and that's really sort of the amazing part
in the innovation is this, this sculpting aspect
to give you a very, very precise three-dimensional shape
at only the scale of about half of a millimeter.
Right now, xenobots are made of only about 5,000 skin
and heart muscle cells, but they can perform basic tasks
like moving in a straight line,
carrying objects from one spot to another
and behaving collectively.
Xenobots don't need to be that sophisticated
to supply some kind of social utility.
We found that even the xenobots
that simply swirl around in their dish,
they tended to clean their dish as they moved through it.
So that is, they tended spontaneously to sweep up
and corral any detritus in their dish
into centralized, neat little piles.
Why they do that is still somewhat of a mystery.
We evolve them in the computer simulation simply to move
and we got something for free because they're living systems
that have their own agenda and do useful things
that weren't necessarily programmed, like cleaning.
At the moment, all xenobots
are constructed out of frog cells,
but if human cells were used instead,
then there's huge medical potential for these machines.
Potentially, they could simply by swirling
around in an artery, scrape plaque off of the walls
or abrade calcium deposits in arthritic joints.
With a little bit more bio-engineering,
we can imagine targeted drug delivery,
which is something that we've been thinking about
even in our very simple simulations.
So, when we evolve inside of a computer a xenobot
to carry a little pellet
from one position to another target position,
what that's getting at is, could these be used
to transport something useful, not just a pellet, but a drug
or medicine to the precise location of disease?
And so, the advantage of using a human patient's own cells
is that the immune response system wouldn't flush it out,
unlike other micro robotic delivery systems
made of metal, for example.
If the production
of xenobots, which exists right now,
could be scaled up hugely,
by automating them with 3D printers,
then they could be used to tackle issues
on a global scale, such as pollution.
We could imagine without too much further bioengineering
simply swarms of xenobots that swirl around and clean,
could be used in the environment
to clean up little microscopic bits of plastic,
to aggregate them into a larger ball of plastic
that could be identified
and picked up by traditional robots, boats, or drones,
and then taken to a recycling center.
Just wear and tear on robots is awful difficult.
So, it's very easy to lose functionality with small changes,
especially when you're dealing with physical motors.
It's fairly catastrophic when there's any sort of damage.
But biological systems for millions of years
have been optimized to resist wear and tear and damage
and certainly, amphibians have many of the same pathways
that we humans do.
So, leveraging that's been great,
it gives us the ability to have organisms
that when they're damaged, can continue functioning
even with fairly catastrophic damage.
So you can largely bisect the xenobot
and it will zipper itself back up in about five minutes
and continue on doing what it did before
and this is really amazing.
We haven't seen another system that can do something
to that extreme.
And Blackiston and Kriegman believe it's not
just the xenobots that are revolutionary,
but also the supercomputer that's used to create them.
One day, it could potentially
help humans redesign themselves.
We have supercomputers that can run millions
of simulations per minute
and it also can be optimized for whatever we would like.
So as humans, we often have goals
that may be slightly different than natural selection.
And we can now have the computer set up evolution
and sort of get through this bottleneck much faster.
So for example, for the heart,
we're seeing that with the types of diets
that humans eat now,
there may be some other type of heart valve
or even some process in the body
or vasculature that's superior to what we humans have
and the computer can likely hone in
on those types of changes very quickly.
I think that the point of the computer simulations
isn't just to speed up evolution.
It's that human designers have really strong biases
in the kinds of artifacts that we make.
So, when a human goes to design a robot,
they inevitably will copy some familiar object.
The robot will look like a dog or a human or a plant
that they've seen before,
some kinds of shapes that are familiar to them.
Now, the computer doesn't share our biases.
It might have it's own biases in it.
But it will come up with designs that look nothing
like any organism or thing that we've seen in the world
And then it's a matter of tackling all the big ethical
and societal questions about should those be implemented?
How much control should we have
over our bodies and the design of humans or other organisms?
These are the same things that the plant scientists
have been grappling with, right?
It's can you make a bigger tomato?
Can you make a bigger apple? Should you?
Should you make it pesticide resistant?
And I think what we're going see are those questions
moving into humans very soon.
We're starting small, we're using xenobots,
but you can extrapolate this on up.
So, if a computer is so good at designing a microorganism,
could the computer design a better horse?
Could the computer design a better cat?
Could this computer make something that's more efficient,
a better heart for humans,
if given the right amount of information
and the right amount of synthetic evolution?
And so, I think there's a real push
to understand how can AI be harnessed to really capitalize
and even push where evolution has gotten us to this point.