Background

ICT technology has traditionally been based on inorganic materials, and on inorganic, non-biological designs. Today's ICT is not life-like or intelligent, nor can it adapt or reproduce itself. Today’s ICT presents us with tremendous information processing power, yet lacks the flexibility and versatility of even the simplest organisms, or components of organisms. A key difference between our man-made ICT technology and biology is that we design and construct ICT systems, which then carry out information processing tasks, working with largely fixed architectures. Biological organisms, in striking contrast, don't operate with such artificial constraints separating their information handling tasks from processes that create or reconfigure their structures. 


This intimate link between system construction or adjustment and function appears to be decisive in giving biological organisms their unmatched capabilities. Hence, learning from biology represents a profound opportunity for ICT technology, and one that appears ripe for exploitation. Over the past decade, important advances in technology for controlling chemistry on the nanoscale, in understanding the molecular biology of cellular processes, and in tackling the engineering required to build components of artificial protocells or minimal cells suggest that we now stand within reach of bringing bio-information processing within technological control. These successes, however, bring into the focus the even greater challenge of integrating these component advances, involving the interplay of biology and physics, ICT, computer sciences, mathematics and engineering, into a practical and powerful science and technology of bio-inspired ICT. 


The key challenge is to learn how to build, design -- and most probably grow --ICT systems that can exploit the same kind of integrated dynamics as biological organisms, thereby allowing rapid adaptation and flexible reconfiguration in response to changing conditions. We must learn to evolve and control assemblies of elements, such as proto-cells, minimal cells or smart artificial cells able to carry out designer independent and intelligent functions, and able to respond through self-assembly and self-regulation. The payoff will be ICT information processing systems that are evolvable, self-replicating, self-repairing and responsive to their environments, while also capable of interfacing with existing ICT systems from where they can take cues about goals and objectives from people. Such capacity would open up a radical new kind of technology coupling information processing with physical control and production, ranging from the macro-level to the micro-level, an integration seen only in living systems today. 


This achievement may well trigger a seismic shift in ICT, transforming our vision of computation as something dealing primarily or exclusively with information into a view in which it is intimately linked also to hardware changes, which influence a system's structure, and therefore its future processing potential. When semi-autonomous programmable artifacts of this kind reach the market, the bulk of all information processing may shift from silicon into this new domain, not because of processing speed, but of the cheap programmable construction of such devices and their potential utility in almost every material context. This transformation will lead to innumerable commercial and non-commercial opportunities, with immense potential benefits to society. Realizing such benefits, of course, will demand careful and honest elaboration and exploration of potential “unintended consequences,” and incremental control on how this radical technology comes into use. 


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