Michael Levin on Diverse Intelligence & Synthbiosis

At the Artificiality Summit 2024, Michael Levin, distinguished professor of biology at Tufts University and associate at Harvard's Wyss Institute, gave a lecture about the emerging field of diverse intelligence and his frameworks for recognizing and communicating with the unconventional intelligence of cells, tissues, and biological robots. This work has led to new approaches to regenerative medicine, cancer, and bioengineering, but also to new ways to understand evolution and embodied minds. He sketched out a space of possibilities—freedom of embodiment—which facilitates imagining a hopeful future of "synthbiosis", in which AI is just one of a wide range of new bodies and minds.

Bio: Michael Levin, Distinguished Professor in the Biology department and Vannevar Bush Chair, serves as director of the Tufts Center for Regenerative and Developmental Biology. Recent honors include the Scientist of Vision award and the Distinguished Scholar Award. His group's focus is on understanding the biophysical mechanisms that implement decision-making during complex pattern regulation, and harnessing endogenous bioelectric dynamics toward rational control of growth and form. The lab's current main directions are:

• Understanding how somatic cells form bioelectrical networks for storing and recalling pattern memories that guide morphogenesis;
• Creating next-generation AI tools for helping scientists understand top-down control of pattern regulation (a new bioinformatics of shape); and
• Using these insights to enable new capabilities in regenerative medicine and engineering.