…but we’ve seen this movie before. The dinosaurs spontaneously change sex. One Alien tears the other apart and uses its acid blood to eat through the walls. Calvin the Martian slips into the conduits and escapes the lab.
How is this not just another form of cloning? Is the whole thing that you can supposedly program future xenobots to follow instructions? How is that different from training a domestic animal to do chores?
Fiction writers should use whatever words they like, but journalists should avoid words with connotations that will deceive their audience. This news is interesting enough without a deceptive use of “robot”. (I know it’s far too late to stop clickbaiting, but it’s still wrong. And this isn’t at all directed at you; I’m glad you posted the link.)
There is a meme floating around the internet about condoms being manufactured by automated machines.
So: robots are actively preventing humans from reproducing.
It’s not a robot in any sense. It’s a cell culture. Cell cultures reproduce. It’s what they do; that’s old news.
I’m sure that the scientists working on these things have reason to be excited, but whatever reason that is, they utterly failed to convey it to the journalists who wrote the story.
What’s different about this, apparently, is that the cells are reproducing in an extremely weird and different way. They’re not simply dividing or conjugating or doing any of the usual things that constitute reproduction. What they’re doing is even stranger than the creature that reproduces by expelling its digestive tract.
I gather that this behavior was determined by whatever was done to culture these cells, essentially “programming” it, which is why the publicity refers to them as “robots”.
To say that these are just a cell culture reproducing , and that’s what cells do, is to pretty much miss the point, which is conveyed pretty well in the news releases.