"This is the first post in a series I plan to write on the work from our group and others that combines ideas from deep learning with ideas from self-organization and collective systems. In this first post, we’ll look at some of the developed approaches and the domains they have been applied to, ranging from growing soft robots and Minecraft machines to self-assembling modular robots, and creating more resilient and adaptive reinforcement learning agents. The merger of these ideas could ultimately allow our AI systems to escape their current limitations such as being brittle, rigid, and not being able to deal with novel situations. However, the combination of these methods also poses new challenges and requires novel ways of training to work as efficiently as possible."