“We've had to redesign a ship from the keel up to make it fully autonomous. You can't have an engine shutoff valve that's literally a manual wheel like you'd use to turn off water in your basement. That doesn't work for software control.”

“Would the genomes proposed by the A.I. make any sense? To find out, the California researchers chemically printed 302 of the software’s genome designs as DNA strands, then mixed those with E. Coli bacteria. That led to a profound ‘A.I.-is-here’ moment when, one night, the scientists saw plaques of dead bacteria in their petri dishes. They later took microscope pictures of the tiny viral particles, which look like fuzzy dots.“That was pretty striking, just actually seeing, like, this AI-generated sphere,” says Brian Hie, who leads the lab at the Arc Institute where the work was carried out…Overall, 16 of the 302 designs ended up working—that is, the computer-designed phage started to replicate, eventually bursting through the bacteria and killing it.”