When I get stuck on a problem I very often go take a walk out to the backyard of our building (and yes, I admit it I have a smoke). I watch the spiders in the Hibiscus bushes- I watched a spider spin its web- they are simple primitive creatures, yet they do VERY complex things. A spider spinning a web is fascinating to watch- there are some simple things it does to ensure that the final product is orderly.

Once it is done it moves to the center of the web and waits- conserving its energy. I sometimes drop a small bit of a leaf into the web and watch how the spider reacts. It tenses when it feels the impact of the object and it waits- it is programmed to not waste energy on a single jolt to its web... but when the bit of leaf starts fluttering in the breeze the vibrations are similar enough to a struggling insect that it triggers the spider's attack programming- the spider strums its web and is able to determine from the web's vibration in response to the strumming exactly where the intruder is. It then races without error to the intruder- it feels the intruder with its mouthparts and legs... it quickly determines that the leaf is not a food item and carefully cleans it from the web without breaking a strand- it drops it from the web and returns to the center to await further input.

Now, with a few billions of dollars I think we could create a machine that could be capable of mimicing the behaviour of the spider- it would be the size of a suitcase and would be incapable of creating something as perfect as spider silk, and powering itself by eating what it catches, and it CERTAINLY would be unable of reproducing itself- yet spiders smaller than a pin head do all that all the time...

We have come a long way with technology, but I think the next step is to use and modify what 4 billion years of evolution has already invented- eventually we will be able to do better than what nature has done, but it will be a while- there is no shame in this- real science has only been around for a thousand years tops... nature has had 4 million times that to perfect its inventions...

The question is, how much faster can we do things with intelligence and planning than evolution can do with random experimentation.