Is This A Good Idea : Science Channel

December 20, 2011

If you've been following recent advances in robotics, you know that automatons are getting soft and malleable. Case in point is this November 2011 Discovery News article, "Robot Builds Itself With Foam," which details the astonishing work being done at the University of Pennsylvania's Modular Robotics Laboratory, where researchers have created a robot that can self-assemble from pieces of commercial-grade insulation. Meanwhile, iRobot, better known as the maker of the Roomba robotic vacuum sweeper, and other researchers have been working on an equally amazing technology -- a shape-shifting ChemBot with a flexible plastic skin filled with granular particles. The latter can remain loosely packed for flexibility or jam together to create a hard object. The "robo-blob," as a Wired.com article calls it, reportedly can slide under doors, squeeze into tight spaces or maneuver on rough terrain in blob-like fashion. The most recent version apparently also has flexible, protean legs as well.

This creepy crawler is being developed for the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which envisions deploying squishbots that can get into places that human soldiers can't penetrate. But if you're a sci-fi movie fan, you can't help but wonder if this is a baby step toward the development of a real-life version of one of the scariest movie villains of all time. I'm talking about T-1000, the advanced-prototype robotic assassin sent back in time by Skynet to kill John Connor in the 1991 flick Terminator 2: Judgment Day. T-1000, portrayed by actor Robert Patrick, lacked his predecessor Terminator's imposing physique, intimidating glare and odd Austrian accent. But he made up for it with his startling ability to change shapes, which allowed him not only to impersonate anyone he chose (so long as he had physically touched them) but also to refashion his index finger into a spike and his arms into grappling hooks and giant pincers. Amazingly, T-1000 could pass through iron grates, merge into a linoleum floor, and even reassemble himself after being frozen and shattered into pieces.

T-1000, of course, was merely a cinematic illusion created by a synergy of computer-generated special effects and the artistic skills of the late special effects virtuoso Stan Winston, who won two Academy Awards for makeup and visual effects for making the robot's abilities look real. The screenplay itself was a bit vague about how the T-1000 actually worked. The earlier-model T-859 Terminator, played by Arnold Schwarzenegger, describes it only as a "mimetic polyalloy (liquid metal)." In the third movie in the series, Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, we get a brief bit of cryptic detail about an even more advanced version, the T-X, which we are told is a "combat chassis covered in a layer of nanomachines." As Belial_77, a fan of the Terminator fictional saga writes in this discussion thread on TV.com, that description suggests T-1000 (and T-X) is not just an individual machine, but actually a collection of extremely tiny machines -- we're talking a few billionths of a meter in length -- connected by a wireless neuro-network that enabled them to communicate and work in synergy to form a single unit, in the fashion of human cells. But because the Terminator movies specify that only living organisms can travel back through time, T-1000 can't be made of just any old metal alloy. Somehow, the metal has to be "alive." That leads Belial_77 to speculate that the advanced, shape-shifting Terminators weren't bolted and sold ered on an assembly line, but rather were test-tube babies "grown" by the evil SkyNet computer network in a laboratory, perhaps by grafting metal onto microbes. "The T-1000 would be a form of a hyper-intelligent, augmented bacteria colony," our writer extrapolates.

Creating an Analog of an Organic Cell

If creating hundreds of billions of microscopic half-bacteria, half-machine cyborgs seems too mind-boggling, there's another possibility. This September 2011 New Scientist article describes the work of a team led by University of Glasgow researcher Lee Cronin, who has used metal-containing molecules called polyoxometalates to build cell-like spheres, which he calls iChells. He's modified them chemically to mimic some of the activities of living organic cells. As New Scientist explains:

An oxide with a hole as part of its structure becomes a porous membrane, selectively allowing chemicals in and out of the cell according to size, just like the walls of biological cells. This property gives the membrane control over the range of chemical reactions that can happen within -- a key feature of specialized cells.

To create a true, functioning analog of an organic cell, scientists also would have to figure out how to equip iChells with the equivalent of DNA to allow the mechanisms to self-replicate and evolve. If they're able to accomplish that -- and I don't see why they couldn't, considering that researchers already have succeeded in getting synthetic DNA to reboot organic cells -- we could see the advent of an inorganic, synthetic metal cell in the near future.

Now, imagine massive numbers of iChells self-assembling into a ChemBot-type flexible, changeable structure. You might end up with a machine resembling T-1000 and possessing its incredible abilities to reshape itself and even mimic objects and people.

Applications in Medicine and Beyond

If we're eventually able to create such a wondrous machine, it begs another question: Should we? Shape-shifting robots would have the potential to transform warfare. But they also could revolutionize medicine. Imagine a robotic surgeon with extremities that could reshape themselves to fit into tiny pathways into the body and perform operations that today are impossible. But shape-shifting robots with advanced artificial intelligence and learning capabilities also might be increasingly difficult for humans to control, which conjures up all sorts of scenarios that could be even scarier than the genocidal dystopia depicted in the Terminator films. (BTW, from H+, the transhumanist magazine, here is a fascinating but disturbing 2009 article in which a panel of scientists and visionaries discusses whether the Terminator future is a real prospect.)

So what do you think? Express your opinion below.

Image Credit: Everett Collection