Even after reading the article, I really don’t understand the use case. Aside from biodegradability, but that doesn’t necessarily require it to be edible to humans. Robots could just deliver the food without being eaten, and then be reused, which seems way more practical/cost-effective. Similarly for health monitoring stuff, wouldn’t it be better if it was designed to be completely inert/durable and then excreted? If anyone understands this better please explain, genuinely baffled
I think this is one of those ideas, that when you first hear about it you scratch your head thinking what on earth could that be useful for?, but then the more you think about it, actually these researchers have a point.
It would be silly to have large edible robots but what if the future is filled with trillions of tiny insect-sized robots? There are already drones being built this size. From that perspective, this makes more sense. For a start they are biodegradable. It gives them all sorts of uses in monitoring health and delivering medicine to animals. Suddenly you can have a whole layer of monitoring tiny robots in the environment and not have to worry about pollution when they come to the end of their useful life span. Not to mention this is a targeted way of delivering food to vulnerable species that may be affected by climate change emergencies.
At least one Black Mirror suggested a dark side to this. My caveat to any solution humans try to come up with to fix problems that we created with technology is, we'll probably introduce a few new problems in doing so, and the original solution may fail at some point leaving us in even worse conditions. We have a Midas touch on things, only it's more gray goo or plasticy than gold.
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