Media
Might we be surrounded with undetected minds? (with Michael Levin) | Podcast
What is intelligence? If we look hard, can we find it in unexpected places: not just in brains but in all kinds of structures? How should we recognize it? And what does any of this have to do with a bipedal dog born without front legs, or making small new organisms out of single cells, or how Wikipedia might be like an axolotl, or why we are so blind to the vast variety of minds that might surround us? Join Eagleman with guest Michael Levin, professor at Tufts, about how we might discover intelligence all around us in ways we don’t typically intuit.
Publications
Fauna Systems’ biobots are built on a foundation of rigorous academic research and are protected by a growing number of patents. Seminal papers include:
- Blackiston, D., Lederer, E., Kriegman, S., Garnier, S., Bongard, J., and Levin, M. (2021). A cellular platform for the development of synthetic living machines. Science Robotics, 6(52): eabf1571. doi: 10.1126/scirobotics.abf1571
- Bongard, J., and Levin, M. (2021). Living things are not (20th Century) machines: updating mechanism metaphors in light of the modern science of machine behavior. Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, 9: 650726. doi: 10.3389/fevo.2021.650726
- Kriegman, S., Blackiston, D., Levin, M., and Bongard, J. (2020). A scalable pipeline for designing reconfigurable organisms. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 117(4): 1853–1859.
- Levin, M., Bongard, J., and Lunshof, J.E. (2020). Applications and ethics of computer-designed organisms. Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology, 21: 655–656.
- Kriegman, S., Blackiston, D., Levin, M., and Bongard, J. (2021). Kinematic self-replication in reconfigurable organisms. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 118(49).
- Davies, J., and Levin, M. (2023). Synthetic morphology with agential materials. Nature Reviews Bioengineering, 1: 46–59. doi: 10.1038/s44222-022-00001-9
- Levin, M. (2023). Darwin’s agential materials: evolutionary implications of multiscale competency in developmental biology. Cellular and Molecular Life Sciences, 80(6): 142. doi: 10.1007/s00018-023-04790-z
- Biological Robots: Perspectives on an Emerging Interdisciplinary Field. Soft Robotics. doi: 10.1089/soro.2022.0142