Robot Reproduction

It might be possible someday to "breed" robots, allowing the robots themselves to select out what traits are most "attractive" in environments with unanticipated challenges. That is the tantalizing idea presented by a research team at VU Amsterdam, who say they have demonstrated a rudimentary proof of concept.

Self-reproducing medical nano robots inside the body could one day act as a "personal virus scanner" to fight germs and cancer cells, according to Guszti Eiben, an artificial intelligence professor at VU Amsterdam who led the team. Eiben, though, acknowledges that the concept, while technically a no-brainer, is ethically problematic: "Some people are OK with self-reproducing and evolving robots on Mars, but not with such things in the human body."

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