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The Anthrobots: a new living entity with much to teach us

Meet the Anthrobots – a new synthetic morphology creation with implications for biomedicine, biorobotics/bioengineering, and basic evolutionary developmental biology.

We envision many future uses in the human body – laying down pro-regenerative molecules, clearing plaque from arteries, healing spinal cord or retinal damage, dealing with cancer cells or bacteria in the gut, or informing us of the status of the surrounding tissues. We don’t know yet what they are capable of, but the idea is that as we learn to program them, we will use not only bottom-up familiar tools of synthetic biology but also top-down controls(training and re-writing of set-point memories) that take advantage of higher levels of organization that may exist in this system. I see the Anthrobots (and synthetic morphology in general) as an exploration device, with which to begin to understand plasticity of the software of life, to probe the competency of the agential material from which are constructed, and to start to map out the region of morphospace and behavioral space around the default outcomes facilitated by the genomic hardware under standard conditions.

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