Animals, big and small, give proof of concept that a largely self-contained industrial base can scale with tiny doubling time (1-3 days) and quickly convert air, power, and low-tech feed into any number of large biorobots. This is a more robust exploratory engineering concept than unfettered atomically precise manufacturing. Biorobots don’t need to be able to think or act on their own, as they can be remotely controlled by AIs running on hardware specialized for running AIs (retaining all the AI advantages).
The issue, as @Tom Davidson said is that we are asking for much more than the proof of concept shows us.
In particular, we are asking for either millions of fruit fly sized objects to merge without creating too much waste heat, or we are asking fruit flies to have a level of sophistication that has never been seen (in particular real fruit flies don’t learn much relevant to what an AI needs them to do):
Are there any examples of metamorphosis doing anything like this? From a quick glance it’s about abrupt changes to one organism during its growth. But you’re suggesting it could also allow millions of fruit-fly-sized-organisms to combine together into a large functional bio robot. That seems like a big jump.
And I don’t think this is a nit pick from me. There’s a clear pattern in biology where bigger and more sophisticated organisms take longer to reproduce. So unclear you can hack around that constraint as you’re saying.
How will the fruit flies flexibly adapt their behaviour to the economic needs and situation, like human physical workers do? Unclear this can all be packed into their AI-designed DNA. And unclear if they can learn to receive instructions from the AI.
The issue, as @Tom Davidson said is that we are asking for much more than the proof of concept shows us.
In particular, we are asking for either millions of fruit fly sized objects to merge without creating too much waste heat, or we are asking fruit flies to have a level of sophistication that has never been seen (in particular real fruit flies don’t learn much relevant to what an AI needs them to do):
The synthetic flies could e.g. have microwave antennae which would allow a centralized AI to control the behavior of each individual.