Evolving, self-replicating robots are here — but don’t worry about an uprising

“We are trying to, if you like, invent a completely new way of designing robots that doesn’t require humans to actually do the designing,” said Alan Winfield. “We’re developing the machine or robot equivalent of artificial selection in the way that farmers have been doing for not just centuries, but for millennia … What we’re interested in is breeding robots. I mean that literally.”