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We are all robots. I mean this in a literal sense. What we call biology is nanorobotics so advanced we still have not fully embraced this reality.
Seriously. Look at this thing. This is clearly a robot. Really hard to argue it isn't. We call this life, yet this part of it, in isolation, we could not consider alive. It is clearly a very small advanced mechanical device. It is observably guided by logic to perform its duty and is undeniably an exercise in molecule-scale robotics.
We struggle to conceptualize ourselves this way. We think of robots as being made of advanced metals and composite materials with electromagnetic actuators and gears for movement and batteries for energy storage. Beep boop stuff. Life, on the other hand, we think of as wet and squishy, soft and throbbing, pulsing with fluids. Zoom in, though. Up close, it’s all electrochemical and chemical/mechanical nanoscale robotics.
Robotics too small to see optically. There is no camera which can take detailed images of these things nor is there even a theoretical possibility we could ever create a camera to observe them directly in detail. We are often talking sub-nanometer mechanical devices. For hundreds of years we used optical magnification microscopes to document biological life processes. But that is way too zoomed-out to be really insightful. It would be like looking at a car factory on the ground from ten thousand feet in the air and observing trucks with car parts going in and finished cars coming out and not knowing anything but ‘this is a car making thing’.
But we have the digital blueprints. We have the DNA which creates protein chains which can fold into these tiny robots. And we have spent the past several decades, mostly by and large unsuccessfully, trying to figure out how to simulate the physics for manufacturing these nanoscale robots directly from the DNA blueprints. And this is the only reason we have been able to construct visualizations like this one. We only just now have a notion of what these devices actually look like because we had to build an entire constellation of physics simulation software and AI prediction models which directly interpret DNA instructions to fold proteins to construct these robots in a virtual environment.
Now we know.
The entire notion of dividing biology and nanorobotics into independent fields of study is probably misguided.
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