An article in Gizmodo - Natural selection in robots - ponders whether nature has lost its monopoly on natural selection. 

Image: Yuval Harari/Chris Watson, Cath Levett/SPL

Engineers have developed a robot that can mimic the process of evolution to produce smarter machines. Teams in Cambridge and Zurich created a 'mother bot' (a robotic arm) capable of assembling little plastic cubes to create 'babies', each with a small motor inside. The 'mother' then observed which of its 'children' moved farthest over a set period, retaining the best and dismantling the rest. It then built new babies based on the surviving designs, to create new offspring with improved performance. After ten such 'generations', the final version could move more than twice as far as its earliest ancestor. 

Lead researcher Fumiya Iida from Cambridge University said he was borrowing directly from nature. "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." Similar research has already been carried out using computer simulation, but this is the first involving real robots. In time, the goal is to produce robots that can adapt to changing circumstances.

That's not the full story, says Professor Yuval Harari. In his article 'Have humans passed their expiry date?' he states:

When we think about the future we generally think about a world in which people who are identical to us in every important way enjoy better technology: laser guns, intelligent robots, and spaceships that travel at the speed of light. Yet the revolutionary potential of future technologies is to change Homo sapiens itself, including our bodies and our minds, and not merely our vehicles and weapons. The most amazing thing about the future won't be the spaceships, but the beings flying them. 

Humans are going to upgrade themselves into gods. That is, humans will acquire abilities that in the past were considered divine, such as eternal youth, mind reading, and the ability to engineer life. 

Physicists define the Big Bang as a singularity. It is a point at which all the known laws of nature did not function. Time too did not exist. It is thus meaningless to say that anything existed 'before' the Big Bang. We may be fast approaching a new singularity, when all the concepts that give meaning to our world - me, you, men, women, love and hate - will become irrelevant. Anything happening beyond that point is meaningless to us.

'Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind' by Yuval Harari:

http://www.bradshawfoundation.com/books/sapiens_a_brief_history_of_humankind.php

http://www.ynharari.com/