Assessment

Like how an amoeba or bacteria is limited to a certain skillset, a Xenobot will be able to execute solely a function defined by its form. Unlike the prior, however, it is more than a single-celled being, meaning that its complexity is exponentially higher. This introduces a wide variety of use cases and would open up the Xenobot to certain tasks that single-celled life would not be able to accomplish. Degrading plastic, transporting material, and many more tasks are correlated with the size of the organism accomplishing them.

At the moment, this technology is experimental and therefore doesn't directly impact humans just yet. Currently it has shown great promise for simple tasks: motion, reproduction, and transport. However, there is not yet enough research into the combination of these tasks into a single form. Furthermore, so far Xenobots have only ever been made from one type of frog stem cell. There are a lot of facets that deserve exploration as this technology matures. Because of the boundless permutations of Xenobots that could exist, this inspires hope that this technology will have vast and impactful applications, while at the same time highlights the massive complexity roadblocks ahead.

In the future, I imagine that Xenobots might be first rolled out into medicine for non-intrusive, non-toxic use cases. For these applications, it is imperative that the Xenobots are as lowkey as possible — the smaller the interaction, the better. It's the same way for the environments they inhabit. Other than the task they complete, they should leave the environment as clean as possible. This is quite different to most other robots, with perhaps the exception of surveillance drones, as Xenobots do not communicate with humans and maintain very low intrusivity.