Evolutionary roboticists have decided to begin teaching artificial intelligence powered robots to evolve and reproduce. Why should humans go to the trouble of building more robots when a robot could do it instead?

According to Futurism, this is known as high-tech Darwinism. The researchers’ ultimate goal is to design artificial intelligence and robots that can analyze their own source code and mate with others by combining bits and pieces of their code with that of other robots. This would to create “offspring,” much like organic life, Futurism reported. But it isn’t actually anything like organic life, actually. But evolutionary roboticists who have this new goal have high-tech Darwinism to the extreme. Apparently, just like biological life evolves to fill ecological niches, these robots’ offspring might be better adapted to their environments that their architects specifically built them for.

An interesting future awaits once high-tech Darwinism becomes successful. And Wired reported that some scientists are well on their way to making this technology a reality.

Computer scientists at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam built a simplified system that shows how future robots might swap and combine their “genetic” information.

Their recent research, published in the journal Nature Machine Intelligence and which involved programming two parent robots to code a new “offspring,” found that the resulting offspring contain a mixture of the parents’ code as well as some modules that seemed to have mutated or been blended on its own. –Futurism

David Howard, one of the scientists on the project, told Wired that there’s a positive spin to all of this. “It gives you a lot of diversity, and it gives you the power to explore areas of a design space that you wouldn’t normally go into.” But others see this as a way to permanently force human beings into extinction. “One of the things that makes natural evolution powerful is the idea that it can really specialize a creature to an environment,” Howard told Wired.

But natural evolution doesn’t sound anything like robot evolution. Humans are making themselves obsolete and our two cents is that this will not end well for humanity.

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