Synthetic biology and (embodied) artificial intelligence: opportunities and challenges

On the 4th of September 2017, the 14th European Conference on Artificial Life (ECAL 2017, Lyon, France) hosted a satellite workshop dedicated to a frontier research question: ‘What can Synthetic Biology offer to (Embodied) Artificial Intelligence (and vice versa)?’ This workshop, as the previous three of the ‘Synthetic Biology (SB)–Artificial Intelligence (AI)’ workshop series, brought together specialists from different disciplines to address the contemporary debate on the evolution of embodied artificial intelligence from a new angle. In a few words: defining the possible roles that SB – an emerging research line combining biology and engineering – can play in the process of establishment of the so-called ‘Embodied paradigm’ in the scientific exploration of cognition and, in particular, in artificial intelligence.