I imagine a more successful version of the Reprap project would count? Ie, the robot is a 3D printer. A human buys plastic & copper (or other metals) & inserts them into the 3D printer. As each part is printed, the human removes it from the tray. The human manually assembles the resulting parts into a copy of the 3D printer.

I suppose you are excluding computer viruses/worms

@mariopasquato Those aren't alive, nor robots.

"Or life form" is doing a good bit of work here. How much do I have to genetically engineer an e.coli bacterium before it qualifies?

@LarsDoucet Lots. Needs to be pretty much built from scratch.

@IsaacKing Does tinkering with viruses count? If over 50% of its material is original?

@LarsDoucet Over 50% of its DNA? Are we anywhere near doing that with present technology?

@IsaacKing Okay that works I suppose

@LarsDoucet I'm not sure how to interpret that; my question wasn't rhetorical.

@IsaacKing I thought you were proposing a threshold

@LarsDoucet Oh, no. I don't know how advanced current biotechnology is, so I was asking for context.

@IsaacKing We can do quite a bit of sythesis,but I presume this doesn't pass the threshold ? https://www.wired.co.uk/article/wired-awake-160519

@MartinModrak I don't understand that paper well enough to give a good answer.

@IsaacKing Then it might be hard to create good resolution criteria. From my (limited, but somewhat informed) understanding of the paper and the overall synthetic biology landscape, there's a lot of incremental progress on modifying and synthesizing genomes and on designing various biological pathways that do not occur in nature. At the same time we have no idea how to build a cell from scratch. So the paper I linked to (and other similar) proceed by synthesizing a modified genome, and replacing the genome of a living cell with it. Can this type of experiment resolve this market YES? And if so, what would count as a sufficiently redesigned genome to resolve YES? Once again, most work is AFAIK on tweaking existing genomes, but the changes are getting more extensive over time, so it is unlikely we'll see an obvious break, where the organism is clearly completely new.

This "normal environment" constrain is going to be a big point of resolution contention. Scientists aren't going to let any replicating artificial organisms loose in the "real world" and just sit back and let them do their thing.

Any such organism is going to exist only in an extremely controlled purpose-built environment.

So I don't think there's any way for this to plausibly resolve to Yes as currently worded, barring some kind of lab escape.

@jonsimon Could be very slow, or done inside containment.