evocon15

Super interesting, thanks for your perspective! Very informative to hear it from a Russian

How is that any different than the way a human feels pain?? We have nerves, which have receptors in our skin and other epithelial layers. When those receptors are activated, an electrical signal is sent via that nerve to our brain. That signal is decoded into a subjective mental state we call pain. The robot has sensors which, when activated send and electrical signal to a computer , which then is decoded into a state that is labeled pain. I'm glossing over a lot of the neuronal details that I'm happy to get into if you want, but mechanically speaking I would actually argue it is very similar to the way we feel pain.

Do you have any tattoos?? :)

What you are talking about is often referred as bio-containment, and it is something that definitely gets a large amount of discussion within the field. Obviously one of the biggest concerns using engineered or even just non native species for Bio remediation like this is that they should interact/disturb the natural environment as little as possible. It's a somewhat complicated field, but one strategy is to engineer strains that require certain compounds, so that they will die when not provided that compound. This would theoretically prevent then spreading/taking over an ecosystem and as soon as the job is done they all die.

And before people ask, yes that is basically the same strategy they tried in Jurassic Park, which was circumvented by evolution, and while this is of course always possible, the "genetic locks" we have today are much better than what they had in mind in Jurassic Park. If people are interested I can past some relevant papers when I'm not on mobile.

Haha you sound like a fellow PhD student. Perhaps a former student. Definitely someone who had paid their dues in lab. Probably a biological sciences type lab.