Frontier stage
Keynote

Building the first living robots

In person
  • Date
    10 July 2025
    Timeframe
    16:00 - 16:20 CEST
    Duration
    20 minutes
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    In order to finally feed, house, and protect all eight billion of us, we must continue scaling agriculture, infrastructure, disaster response, and environmental remediation. But these are all big jobs and cannot be done by hand: robots are needed. Unfortunately, current robots capable of these tasks are built from metal, plastics, rare-earth minerals, and run on fossil fuels or increasingly rare lithium. So, our team is working to replace such robots with “living robots” built from biological cells rather than inorganic components. Living robots are carbon-neutral, biocompatible, and biodegradable: at end of life, they become food for other organisms. Designing and building robots from biological materials is tricky though. So, here, I will describe how AI can learn to rearrange and recombine biological tissues into new biological constructs never before seen on earth, that act in new ways, and provide us with new opportunities for a green path forward.