Researchers builds first living robots—that can reproduce using kinematic self replication

Amazing stuff!

Unfortunately, you find in this article also a scary, dubious, and cringe worthy statement from the senior author of this research  Josh Bongard, who lacks humility and sounds like he is an all knowing god. I am afraid, there are plenty of other contemporary researchers with similar dangerous convictions like a Dr. Mengele:

"“We are working to understand this property: replication. The world and technologies are rapidly changing. It’s important, for society as a whole, that we study and understand how this works,” says Bongard. These millimeter-sized living machines, entirely contained in a laboratory, easily extinguished, and vetted by federal, state and institutional ethics experts, “are not what keep me awake at night. What presents risk is the next pandemic; accelerating ecosystem damage from pollution; intensifying threats from climate change,” says UVM’s Bongard. “This is an ideal system in which to study self-replicating systems. We have a moral imperative to understand the conditions under which we can control it, direct it, douse it, exaggerate it.” ...
“We need to create technological solutions that grow at the same rate as the challenges we face,” Bongard says. ..."

"The same team that built the first living robots (“Xenobots,” assembled from frog cells—reported in 2020) has discovered that these computer-designed and hand-assembled organisms can swim out into their tiny dish, find single cells, gather hundreds of them together, and assemble “baby” Xenobots inside their Pac-Man-shaped “mouth”—that, a few days later, become new Xenobots that look and move just like themselves. ...
On its own, the Xenobot parent, made of some 3,000 cells, forms a sphere. ... But with an artificial intelligence program ... an evolutionary algorithm was able to test billions of body shapes in simulation—triangles, squares, pyramids, starfish—to find ones that allowed the cells to be more effective at the motion-based “kinematic” replication ...

Kinematic replication is well-known at the level of molecules—but it has never been observed before at the scale of whole cells or organisms. ..."

From the abstract:

"... We find that synthetic multicellular assemblies can also replicate kinematically by moving and compressing dissociated cells in their environment into functional self-copies. This form of perpetuation, previously unseen in any organism, arises spontaneously over days rather than evolving over millennia. We also show how artificial intelligence methods can design assemblies that postpone loss of replicative ability and perform useful work as a side effect of replication. This suggests other unique and useful phenotypes can be rapidly reached from wild-type organisms without selection or genetic engineering, thereby broadening our understanding of the conditions under which replication arises, phenotypic plasticity, and how useful replicative machines may be realized."

Team builds first living robots—that can reproduce AI-designed Xenobots reveal entirely new form of biological self-replication—promising for regenerative medicine

Kinematic self-replication in reconfigurable organisms (open access)