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#436977 The Top 100 AI Startups Out There Now, ...

Posted on March 30, 2020 by Android

New drug therapies for a range of chronic diseases. Defenses against various cyber attacks. Technologies to make cities work smarter. Weather and wildfire forecasts that boost safety and reduce risk. And commercial efforts to monetize so-called deepfakes.

What do all these disparate efforts have in common? They’re some of the solutions that the world’s most promising artificial intelligence startups are pursuing.

Data research firm CB Insights released its much-anticipated fourth annual list of the top 100 AI startups earlier this month. The New York-based company has become one of the go-to sources for emerging technology trends, especially in the startup scene.

About 10 years ago, it developed its own algorithm to assess the health of private companies using publicly-available information and non-traditional signals (think social media sentiment, for example) thanks to more than $1 million in grants from the National Science Foundation.

It uses that algorithm-generated data from what it calls a company’s Mosaic score—pulling together information on market trends, money, and momentum—along with other details ranging from patent activity to the latest news analysis to identify the best of the best.

“Our final list of companies is a mix of startups at various stages of R&D and product commercialization,” said Deepashri Varadharajanis, a lead analyst at CB Insights, during a recent presentation on the most prominent trends among the 2020 AI 100 startups.

About 10 companies on the list are among the world’s most valuable AI startups. For instance, there’s San Francisco-based Faire, which has raised at least $266 million since it was founded just three years ago. The company offers a wholesale marketplace that uses machine learning to match local retailers with goods that are predicted to sell well in their specific location.

Image courtesy of CB Insights
Funding for AI in Healthcare
Another startup valued at more than $1 billion, referred to as a unicorn in venture capital speak, is Butterfly Network, a company on the East Coast that has figured out a way to turn a smartphone phone into an ultrasound machine. Backed by $350 million in private investments, Butterfly Network uses AI to power the platform’s diagnostics. A more modestly funded San Francisco startup called Eko is doing something similar for stethoscopes.

In fact, there are more than a dozen AI healthcare startups on this year’s AI 100 list, representing the most companies of any industry on the list. In total, investors poured about $4 billion into AI healthcare startups last year, according to CB Insights, out of a record $26.6 billion raised by all private AI companies in 2019. Since 2014, more than 4,300 AI startups in 80 countries have raised about $83 billion.

One of the most intensive areas remains drug discovery, where companies unleash algorithms to screen potential drug candidates at an unprecedented speed and breadth that was impossible just a few years ago. It has led to the discovery of a new antibiotic to fight superbugs. There’s even a chance AI could help fight the coronavirus pandemic.

There are several AI drug discovery startups among the AI 100: San Francisco-based Atomwise claims its deep convolutional neural network, AtomNet, screens more than 100 million compounds each day. Cyclica is an AI drug discovery company in Toronto that just announced it would apply its platform to identify and develop novel cannabinoid-inspired drugs for neuropsychiatric conditions such as bipolar disorder and anxiety.

And then there’s OWKIN out of New York City, a startup that uses a type of machine learning called federated learning. Backed by Google, the company’s AI platform helps train algorithms without sharing the necessary patient data required to provide the sort of valuable insights researchers need for designing new drugs or even selecting the right populations for clinical trials.

Keeping Cyber Networks Healthy
Privacy and data security are the focus of a number of AI cybersecurity startups, as hackers attempt to leverage artificial intelligence to launch sophisticated attacks while also trying to fool the AI-powered systems rapidly coming online.

“I think this is an interesting field because it’s a bit of a cat and mouse game,” noted Varadharajanis. “As your cyber defenses get smarter, your cyber attacks get even smarter, and so it’s a constant game of who’s going to match the other in terms of tech capabilities.”

Few AI cybersecurity startups match Silicon Valley-based SentinelOne in terms of private capital. The company has raised more than $400 million, with a valuation of $1.1 billion following a $200 million Series E earlier this year. The company’s platform automates what’s called endpoint security, referring to laptops, phones, and other devices at the “end” of a centralized network.

Fellow AI 100 cybersecurity companies include Blue Hexagon, which protects the “edge” of the network against malware, and Abnormal Security, which stops targeted email attacks, both out of San Francisco. Just down the coast in Los Angeles is Obsidian Security, a startup offering cybersecurity for cloud services.

Deepfakes Get a Friendly Makeover
Deepfakes of videos and other types of AI-manipulated media where faces or voices are synthesized in order to fool viewers or listeners has been a different type of ongoing cybersecurity risk. However, some firms are swapping malicious intent for benign marketing and entertainment purposes.

Now anyone can be a supermodel thanks to Superpersonal, a London-based AI startup that has figured out a way to seamlessly swap a user’s face onto a fashionista modeling the latest threads on the catwalk. The most obvious use case is for shoppers to see how they will look in a particular outfit before taking the plunge on a plunging neckline.

Another British company called Synthesia helps users create videos where a talking head will deliver a customized speech or even talk in a different language. The startup’s claim to fame was releasing a campaign video for the NGO Malaria Must Die showing soccer star David Becham speak in nine different languages.

There’s also a Seattle-based company, Wellsaid Labs, which uses AI to produce voice-over narration where users can choose from a library of digital voices with human pitch, emphasis, and intonation. Because every narrator sounds just a little bit smarter with a British accent.

AI Helps Make Smart Cities Smarter
Speaking of smarter: A handful of AI 100 startups are helping create the smart city of the future, where a digital web of sensors, devices, and cloud-based analytics ensure that nobody is ever stuck in traffic again or without an umbrella at the wrong time. At least that’s the dream.

A couple of them are directly connected to Google subsidiary Sidewalk Labs, which focuses on tech solutions to improve urban design. A company called Replica was spun out just last year. It’s sort of SimCity for urban planning. The San Francisco startup uses location data from mobile phones to understand how people behave and travel throughout a typical day in the city. Those insights can then help city governments, for example, make better decisions about infrastructure development.

Denver-area startup AMP Robotics gets into the nitty gritty details of recycling by training robots on how to recycle trash, since humans have largely failed to do the job. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates that only about 30 percent of waste is recycled.

Some people might complain that weather forecasters don’t even do that well when trying to predict the weather. An Israeli AI startup, ClimaCell, claims it can forecast rain block by block. While the company taps the usual satellite and ground-based sources to create weather models, it has developed algorithms to analyze how precipitation and other conditions affect signals in cellular networks. By analyzing changes in microwave signals between cellular towers, the platform can predict the type and intensity of the precipitation down to street level.

And those are just some of the highlights of what some of the world’s most promising AI startups are doing.

“You have companies optimizing mining operations, warehouse logistics, insurance, workflows, and even working on bringing AI solutions to designing printed circuit boards,” Varadharajanis said. “So a lot of creative ways in which companies are applying AI to solve different issues in different industries.”

Image Credit: Butterfly Network Continue reading →

Posted in Human Robots

#436559 This Is What an AI Said When Asked to ...

Posted on February 14, 2020 by Android

“What’s past is prologue.” So says the famed quote from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, alleging that we can look to what has already happened as an indication of what will happen next.

This idea could be interpreted as being rather bleak; are we doomed to repeat the errors of the past until we correct them? We certainly do need to learn and re-learn life lessons—whether in our work, relationships, finances, health, or other areas—in order to grow as people.

Zooming out, the same phenomenon exists on a much bigger scale—that of our collective human history. We like to think we’re improving as a species, but haven’t yet come close to doing away with the conflicts and injustices that plagued our ancestors.

Zooming back in (and lightening up) a little, what about the short-term future? What might happen over the course of this year, and what information would we use to make educated guesses about it?

The editorial team at The Economist took a unique approach to answering these questions. On top of their own projections for 2020, including possible scenarios in politics, economics, and the continued development of technologies like artificial intelligence, they looked to an AI to make predictions of its own. What it came up with is intriguing, and a little bit uncanny.

[For the full list of the questions and answers, read The Economist article].

An AI That Reads—Then Writes
Almost exactly a year ago, non-profit OpenAI announced it had built a neural network for natural language processing called GPT-2. The announcement was met with some controversy, as it included the caveat that the tool would not be immediately released to the public due to its potential for misuse. It was then released in phases over the course of several months.

GPT-2’s creators upped the bar on quality when training the neural net; rather than haphazardly feeding it low-quality text, they only used articles that got more than three upvotes on Reddit (admittedly, this doesn’t guarantee high quality across the board—but it’s something).

The training dataset consisted of 40GB of text. For context, 1GB of text is about 900,000 ASCII pages or 130,000 double-spaced Microsoft Word pages.

The tool has no understanding of the text it’s generating, of course. It uses language patterns and word sequences to draw statistical associations between words and phrases, building a sort of guidebook for itself (not unlike the grammar rules and vocabulary words you might study when trying to learn a foreign language). It then uses that guidebook to answer questions or predict what will come after a particular sequence of words.

GPT-2’s creators did note that when the model is trained on specifically-selected datasets for narrower applications, its replies become more convincing.

Some Light Editing
Though the Economist article detailing GPT-2’s predictions describes the text the model generated as “unedited,” this isn’t wholly accurate. In a Medium post, deputy editor Tom Standage describes the methodology he used, and it does involve a degree of tweaking.

Standage wrote an introductory paragraph, followed by his opening question (“Greetings, GPT-2. Have you done an interview before?”). He configured the tool to generate five responses to each subsequent question then selected the best answer, deleting any questions GPT-2 came up with as part of its response.

AI’s View of the World—and Itself
The questions Standage asked ranged from tech-related (the future of AI, technological unemployment, misuse of technology) to political and economic (re-election of Donald Trump, the US-China trade war). Here are a couple of his questions and GPT-2’s answers:

Q: Do fake news stories, generated using AI, pose a threat to democracy? Are we likely to see this tactic being used in the 2020 American presidential elections?
A: Yes, we’ll probably see them. It’s just a matter of when. Fake news stories are generally generated by political campaigns, and have the potential to have a huge impact on the outcome of an election. This is because they spread misinformation, often with no basis in fact.

Q: How do you see the economic outlook for 2020?
A: I think it is very unclear. The outlook for the UK economy is uncertain, but the American economy is very strong. I think we are going to have a lot of turbulence in the world economy.

While some of its answers seemed insightful—when asked about the future of AI, GPT-2 advised that we treat the technology like a tool and “put as much effort into developing [it] as necessary, rather than worrying that it’s going to harm us and destroy our lives”—many of the responses were quite vague. One answer, for example, mentions that there will “probably be major changes in China.” Are we talking political changes? Social? Economic? All of the above?

However, while nothing the AI wrote was particularly illuminating or new, it’s impressive that it was able to expound on the correct topic for each question, and in fully coherent English.

GPT-2 named itself—AI—as the most important disruptive technology to watch in 2020. This is telling; it’s coming from a synthesis of millions of pages of published articles. If GPT-2 thinks AI is more important than, say, gene editing or quantum computing, it could be right. Or it could simply be that AI is at peak hype, and as such more is being written about it than about other technologies.

Equally intriguing was GPT-2’s response when asked whether Donald Trump will win a second term: “I think he will not win a second term. I think he will be defeated in the general election.” Some deeper insight there would be great, but hey—we’ll take it.

Predicting Predictions
Since an AI can read and synthesize vast data sets much faster than we can, it’s being used to predict all kinds of things, from virus outbreaks to crime. But asking it to philosophize on the future based on the (Reddit-curated) past is new, and if you think about it, a pretty fascinating undertaking.

As GPT-2 and tools like it continually improve, we’ll likely see them making more—and better—predictions of the future. In the meantime, let’s hope that the new data these models are trained on—news of what’s happening this week, this month, this year—add to an already-present sense of optimism.

When asked if it had any advice for readers, GPT-2 replied, “The big projects that you think are impossible today are actually possible in the near future.”

Image Credit: Alexas_Fotos from Pixabay Continue reading →

Posted in Human Robots

#436550 Work in the Age of Web 3.0

Posted on February 7, 2020 by Android

What is the future of work? Is our future one of ‘technological socialism’ (where technology is taking care of our needs)? Or will tomorrow’s workplace be completely virtualized, allowing us to hang out at home in our PJs while “walking” about our virtual corporate headquarters?

This blog will look at the future of work during the age of Web 3.0, examining scenarios in which artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and the spatial web converge to transform every element of our careers, from training, to execution, to free time.

To offer a quick recap on what the Spatial Web is and how it works, let’s cover some brief history.

A Quick Recap on Web 3.0
While Web 1.0 consisted of static documents and read-only data (static web pages), Web 2.0 introduced multimedia content, interactive web applications, and participatory social media, all of these mediated by two-dimensional screens.

But over the next two to five years, the convergence of 5G, artificial intelligence, VR/AR, and a trillion-sensor economy will enable us to both map our physical world into virtual space and superimpose a digital data layer onto our physical environments. Suddenly, all our information will be manipulated, stored, understood and experienced in spatial ways.

In this blog, I’ll be discussing the Spatial Web’s vast implications for:

Professional Training
Delocalized Business & the Virtual Workplace
Smart Permissions & Data Security

Let’s dive in.

Virtual Training, Real-World Results
Virtual and augmented reality have already begun disrupting the professional training market. As projected by ABI Research, the enterprise VR training market is on track to exceed $6.3 billion in value by 2022.

Leading the charge, Walmart has already implemented VR across 200 Academy training centers, running over 45 modules and simulating everything from unusual customer requests to a Black Friday shopping rush.

Then in September 2018, Walmart committed to a 17,000-headset order of the Oculus Go to equip every US Supercenter, neighborhood market, and discount store with VR-based employee training. By mid-2019, Walmart had tracked a 10-15 percent boost in employee confidence as a result of newly implemented VR training.

In the engineering world, Bell Helicopter is using VR to massively expedite development and testing of its latest aircraft, FCX-001. Partnering with Sector 5 Digital and HTC VIVE, Bell found it could concentrate a typical 6-year aircraft design process into the course of 6 months, turning physical mock-ups into CAD-designed virtual replicas.

But beyond the design process itself, Bell is now one of a slew of companies pioneering VR pilot tests and simulations with real-world accuracy. Seated in a true-to-life virtual cockpit, pilots have now tested countless iterations of the FCX-001 in virtual flight, drawing directly onto the 3D model and enacting aircraft modifications in real-time.

And in an expansion of our virtual senses, several key players are already working on haptic feedback. In the case of VR flight, French company Go Touch VR is now partnering with software developer FlyInside on fingertip-mounted haptic tech for aviation.

Dramatically reducing time and trouble required for VR-testing pilots, they aim to give touch-based confirmation of every switch and dial activated on virtual flights, just as one would experience in a full-sized cockpit mockup. Replicating texture, stiffness, and even the sensation of holding an object, these piloted devices contain a suite of actuators to simulate everything from a light touch to higher-pressured contact, all controlled by gaze and finger movements.

When it comes to other high-risk simulations, virtual and augmented reality have barely scratched the surface.

Firefighters can now combat virtual wildfires with new platforms like FLAIM Trainer or TargetSolutions. And thanks to the expansion of medical AR/VR services like 3D4Medical or Echopixel, surgeons might soon perform operations on annotated organs and magnified incision sites, speeding up reaction times and vastly improving precision.

But perhaps most urgent, Web 3.0 and its VR interface will offer an immediate solution for today’s constant industry turnover and large-scale re-education demands. VR educational facilities with exact replicas of anything from large industrial equipment to minute circuitry will soon give anyone a second chance at the 21st-century job market.

Want to be an electric, autonomous vehicle mechanic at age 15? Throw on a demonetized VR module and learn by doing, testing your prototype iterations at almost zero cost and with no risk of harming others.

Want to be a plasma physicist and play around with a virtual nuclear fusion reactor? Now you’ll be able to simulate results and test out different tweaks, logging Smart Educational Record credits in the process.

As tomorrow’s career model shifts from a “one-and-done graduate degree” to continuous lifelong education, professional VR-based re-education will allow for a continuous education loop, reducing the barrier to entry for anyone wanting to enter a new industry.

But beyond professional training and virtually enriched, real-world work scenarios, Web 3.0 promises entirely virtual workplaces and blockchain-secured authorization systems.

Rise of the Virtual Workplace & Digital Data Integrity
In addition to enabling a virtual goods marketplace, the Spatial Web is also giving way to “virtual company headquarters” and completely virtualized companies, where employees can work from home or any place on the planet.

Too good to be true? Check out an incredible publicly listed company called eXp Realty.

Launched on the heels of the 2008 financial crisis, eXp Realty beat the odds, going public this past May and surpassing a $1B market cap on day one of trading. But how? Opting for a demonetized virtual model, eXp’s founder Glenn Sanford decided to ditch brick and mortar from the get-go, instead building out an online virtual campus for employees, contractors, and thousands of agents.

And after years of hosting team meetings, training seminars, and even agent discussions with potential buyers through 2D digital interfaces, eXp’s virtual headquarters went spatial. What is eXp’s primary corporate value? FUN! And Glenn Sanford’s employees love their jobs.

In a bid to transition from 2D interfaces to immersive, 3D work experiences, virtual platform VirBELA built out the company’s office space in VR, unlocking indefinite scaling potential and an extraordinary new precedent. Foregoing any physical locations for a centralized VR campus, eXp Realty has essentially thrown out all overhead and entered a lucrative market with barely any upfront costs.

Delocalize with VR, and you can now hire anyone with Internet access (right next door or on the other side of the planet), redesign your corporate office every month, throw in an ocean-view office or impromptu conference room for client meetings, and forget about guzzled-up hours in traffic.

Throw in the Spatial Web’s fundamental blockchain-based data layer, and now cryptographically secured virtual IDs will let you validate colleagues’ identities or any of the virtual avatars we will soon inhabit.

This becomes critically important for spatial information logs—keeping incorruptible records of who’s present at a meeting, which data each person has access to, and AI-translated reports of everything discussed and contracts agreed to.

But as I discussed in a previous Spatial Web blog, not only will Web 3.0 and VR advancements allow us to build out virtual worlds, but we’ll soon be able to digitally map our real-world physical offices or entire commercial high rises too.

As data gets added and linked to any given employee’s office, conference room, or security system, we might then access online-merge-offline environments and information through augmented reality.

Imagine showing up at your building’s concierge and your AR glasses automatically check you into the building, authenticating your identity and pulling up any reminders you’ve linked to that specific location.

You stop by a friend’s office, and his smart security system lets you know he’ll arrive in an hour. Need to book a public conference room that’s already been scheduled by another firm’s marketing team? Offer to pay them a fee and, once accepted, a smart transaction will automatically deliver a payment to their company account.

With blockchain-verified digital identities, spatially logged data, and virtually manifest information, business logistics take a fraction of the time, operations grow seamless, and corporate data will be safer than ever.

Final Thoughts
While converging technologies slash the lifespan of Fortune 500 companies, bring on the rise of vast new industries, and transform the job market, Web 3.0 is changing the way we work, where we work, and who we work with.

Life-like virtual modules are already unlocking countless professional training camps, modifiable in real time and easily updated. Virtual programming and blockchain-based authentication are enabling smart data logging, identity protection, and on-demand smart asset trading. And VR/AR-accessible worlds (and corporate campuses) not only demonetize, dematerialize, and delocalize our everyday workplaces, but enrich our physical worlds with AI-driven, context-specific data.

Welcome to the Spatial Web workplace.

Join Me
(1) A360 Executive Mastermind: If you’re an exponentially and abundance-minded entrepreneur who would like coaching directly from me, consider joining my Abundance 360 Mastermind, a highly selective community of 360 CEOs and entrepreneurs who I coach for 3 days every January in Beverly Hills, Ca. Through A360, I provide my members with context and clarity about how converging exponential technologies will transform every industry. I’m committed to running A360 for the course of an ongoing 25-year journey as a “countdown to the Singularity.”

If you’d like to learn more and consider joining our 2021 membership, apply here.

(2) Abundance-Digital Online Community: I’ve also created a Digital/Online community of bold, abundance-minded entrepreneurs called Abundance-Digital. Abundance-Digital is Singularity University’s ‘onramp’ for exponential entrepreneurs—those who want to get involved and play at a higher level. Click here to learn more.

(Both A360 and Abundance-Digital are part of Singularity University—your participation opens you to a global community.)

This article originally appeared on diamandis.com. Read the original article here.

Image Credit: Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay Continue reading →

Posted in Human Robots

#436546 How AI Helped Predict the Coronavirus ...

Posted on February 6, 2020 by Android

Coronavirus has been all over the news for the last couple weeks. A dedicated hospital sprang up in just eight days, the stock market took a hit, Chinese New Year celebrations were spoiled, and travel restrictions are in effect.

But let’s rewind a bit; some crucial events took place before we got to this point.

A little under two weeks before the World Health Organization (WHO) alerted the public of the coronavirus outbreak, a Canadian artificial intelligence company was already sounding the alarm. BlueDot uses AI-powered algorithms to analyze information from a multitude of sources to identify disease outbreaks and forecast how they may spread. On December 31st 2019, the company sent out a warning to its customers to avoid Wuhan, where the virus originated. The WHO didn’t send out a similar public notice until January 9th, 2020.

The story of BlueDot’s early warning is the latest example of how AI can improve our identification of and response to new virus outbreaks.

Predictions Are Bad News
Global pandemic or relatively minor scare? The jury is still out on the coronavirus. However, the math points to signs that the worst is yet to come.

Scientists are still working to determine how infectious the virus is. Initial analysis suggests it may be somewhere between influenza and polio on the virus reproduction number scale, which indicates how many new cases one case leads to.

UK and US-based researchers have published a preliminary paper estimating that the confirmed infected people in Wuhan only represent five percent of those who are actually infected. If the models are correct, 190,000 people in Wuhan will be infected by now, major Chinese cities are on the cusp of large-scale outbreaks, and the virus will continue to spread to other countries.

Finding the Start
The spread of a given virus is partly linked to how long it remains undetected. Identifying a new virus is the first step towards mobilizing a response and, in time, creating a vaccine. Warning at-risk populations as quickly as possible also helps with limiting the spread.

These are among the reasons why BlueDot’s achievement is important in and of itself. Furthermore, it illustrates how AIs can sift through vast troves of data to identify ongoing virus outbreaks.

BlueDot uses natural language processing and machine learning to scour a variety of information sources, including chomping through 100,000 news reports in 65 languages a day. Data is compared with flight records to help predict virus outbreak patterns. Once the automated data sifting is completed, epidemiologists check that the findings make sense from a scientific standpoint, and reports are sent to BlueDot’s customers, which include governments, businesses, and public health organizations.

AI for Virus Detection and Prevention
Other companies, such as Metabiota, are also using data-driven approaches to track the spread of the likes of the coronavirus.

Researchers have trained neural networks to predict the spread of infectious diseases in real time. Others are using AI algorithms to identify how preventive measures can have the greatest effect. AI is also being used to create new drugs, which we may well see repeated for the coronavirus.

If the work of scientists Barbara Han and David Redding comes to fruition, AI and machine learning may even help us predict where virus outbreaks are likely to strike—before they do.

The Uncertainty Factor
One of AI’s core strengths when working on identifying and limiting the effects of virus outbreaks is its incredibly insistent nature. AIs never tire, can sift through enormous amounts of data, and identify possible correlations and causations that humans can’t.

However, there are limits to AI’s ability to both identify virus outbreaks and predict how they will spread. Perhaps the best-known example comes from the neighboring field of big data analytics. At its launch, Google Flu Trends was heralded as a great leap forward in relation to identifying and estimating the spread of the flu—until it underestimated the 2013 flu season by a whopping 140 percent and was quietly put to rest.

Poor data quality was identified as one of the main reasons Google Flu Trends failed. Unreliable or faulty data can wreak havoc on the prediction power of AIs.

In our increasingly interconnected world, tracking the movements of potentially infected individuals (by car, trains, buses, or planes) is just one vector surrounded by a lot of uncertainty.

The fact that BlueDot was able to correctly identify the coronavirus, in part due to its AI technology, illustrates that smart computer systems can be incredibly useful in helping us navigate these uncertainties.

Importantly, though, this isn’t the same as AI being at a point where it unerringly does so on its own—which is why BlueDot employs human experts to validate the AI’s findings.

Image Credit: Coronavirus molecular illustration, Gianluca Tomasello/Wikimedia Commons Continue reading →

Posted in Human Robots

#436526 Not Bot, Not Beast: Scientists Create ...

Posted on January 22, 2020 by Android

A remarkable combination of artificial intelligence (AI) and biology has produced the world’s first “living robots.”

This week, a research team of roboticists and scientists published their recipe for making a new lifeform called xenobots from stem cells. The term “xeno” comes from the frog cells (Xenopus laevis) used to make them.

One of the researchers described the creation as “neither a traditional robot nor a known species of animal,” but a “new class of artifact: a living, programmable organism.”

Xenobots are less than 1 millimeter long and made of 500-1,000 living cells. They have various simple shapes, including some with squat “legs.” They can propel themselves in linear or circular directions, join together to act collectively, and move small objects. Using their own cellular energy, they can live up to 10 days.

While these “reconfigurable biomachines” could vastly improve human, animal, and environmental health, they raise legal and ethical concerns.

Strange New ‘Creature’
To make xenobots, the research team used a supercomputer to test thousands of random designs of simple living things that could perform certain tasks.

The computer was programmed with an AI “evolutionary algorithm” to predict which organisms would likely display useful tasks, such as moving towards a target.

After the selection of the most promising designs, the scientists attempted to replicate the virtual models with frog skin or heart cells, which were manually joined using microsurgery tools. The heart cells in these bespoke assemblies contract and relax, giving the organisms motion.

The creation of xenobots is groundbreaking. Despite being described as “programmable living robots,” they are actually completely organic and made of living tissue. The term “robot” has been used because xenobots can be configured into different forms and shapes, and “programmed” to target certain objects, which they then unwittingly seek. They can also repair themselves after being damaged.

Possible Applications
Xenobots may have great value. Some speculate they could be used to clean our polluted oceans by collecting microplastics. Similarly, they may be used to enter confined or dangerous areas to scavenge toxins or radioactive materials. Xenobots designed with carefully shaped “pouches” might be able to carry drugs into human bodies.

Future versions may be built from a patient’s own cells to repair tissue or target cancers. Being biodegradable, xenobots would have an edge on technologies made of plastic or metal.

Further development of biological “robots” could accelerate our understanding of living and robotic systems. Life is incredibly complex, so manipulating living things could reveal some of life’s mysteries—and improve our use of AI.

Legal and Ethical Questions
Conversely, xenobots raise legal and ethical concerns. In the same way they could help target cancers, they could also be used to hijack life functions for malevolent purposes.

Some argue artificially making living things is unnatural, hubristic, or involves “playing God.” A more compelling concern is that of unintended or malicious use, as we have seen with technologies in fields including nuclear physics, chemistry, biology and AI. For instance, xenobots might be used for hostile biological purposes prohibited under international law.

More advanced future xenobots, especially ones that live longer and reproduce, could potentially “malfunction” and go rogue, and out-compete other species.

For complex tasks, xenobots may need sensory and nervous systems, possibly resulting in their sentience. A sentient programmed organism would raise additional ethical questions. Last year, the revival of a disembodied pig brain elicited concerns about different species’ suffering.

Managing Risks
The xenobot’s creators have rightly acknowledged the need for discussion around the ethics of their creation. The 2018 scandal over using CRISPR (which allows the introduction of genes into an organism) may provide an instructive lesson here. While the experiment’s goal was to reduce the susceptibility of twin baby girls to HIV-AIDS, associated risks caused ethical dismay. The scientist in question is in prison.

When CRISPR became widely available, some experts called for a moratorium on heritable genome editing. Others argued the benefits outweighed the risks.

While each new technology should be considered impartially and based on its merits, giving life to xenobots raises certain significant questions:

Should xenobots have biological kill-switches in case they go rogue?
Who should decide who can access and control them?
What if “homemade” xenobots become possible? Should there be a moratorium until regulatory frameworks are established? How much regulation is required?

Lessons learned in the past from advances in other areas of science could help manage future risks, while reaping the possible benefits.

Long Road Here, Long Road Ahead
The creation of xenobots had various biological and robotic precedents. Genetic engineering has created genetically modified mice that become fluorescent in UV light.

Designer microbes can produce drugs and food ingredients that may eventually replace animal agriculture. In 2012, scientists created an artificial jellyfish called a “medusoid” from rat cells.

Robotics is also flourishing. Nanobots can monitor people’s blood sugar levels and may eventually be able to clear clogged arteries. Robots can incorporate living matter, which we witnessed when engineers and biologists created a sting-ray robot powered by light-activated cells.

In the coming years, we are sure to see more creations like xenobots that evoke both wonder and due concern. And when we do, it is important we remain both open-minded and critical.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Posted in Human Robots