Those of you concerned that robots might one day take over have been vindicated – they are evolving.
Natural selection was the one thing we had over machines, but now they can mimic that process with “unnatural selection.”
In a study undertaken at the University of Cambridge, a “mother robot” created smaller “baby robots.” She would then evaluate her offspring and, much like animals that eat their own kind, take them apart if she deemed them unfit. The ones that worked best were allowed to remain intact.
“Natural selection is basically reproduction, assessment, reproduction, assessment and so on. That’s essentially what this robot is doing – we can actually watch the improvement and diversification of the species,” lead researcher Dr. Fumiya Iida said in the news release.
This advancement may be terrifying to some, but Iida assures us that robots still have quite a ways to go before they can look, act, and think like humans.
See the mother robot in action: