I’m alive. Your dog is alive. The ginormous spider keeping you from going into your own bathroom is alive.

But although you may find yourself shouting obscenities at them, your smart phone, your laptop and your local automated supermarket checkout are certainly not alive.

It seems self evident that there is a divide between machine and lifeform but for how long will that differentiation remain obvious to us?

Sam Kriegman is a PhD student in Evolutionary Robotics at the University of Vermont and Lead Author of a new paper on Xenobots.