General Lines, Routes and Perspectives of Wetware Embodied AI. From Its Organizational Bases to a Glimpse on Social Chemical Robotics

In this contribution we would like to put forward a proposal about a novel form of AI, called “Wetware Embodied AI”, based on the construction of bio-chemical dynamical systems intended as models of living and cognitive systems. The ambition is complementing common approaches in robotics and AI, mainly characterized by behavioral imitation of the cognitive processes under inquiry, with more radical approaches, aiming at creating artificial models reproducing (aspects of) the organizational mechanisms underlying the target process in nature. To this aim, we will first recapitulate some aspects of frontier research lines in AI (in particular, Embodied AI and related approaches), and then present a wetware version of it, together with a brief plan for theoretical and experimental investigations. The role of synthetic biology and systems chemistry to accomplish these goals will be highlighted. Considering the connection of this program with the current experimental trends about communicating synthetic cells, a final brief comment on the “social chemical robotics” perspectives closes the article.