George Zarkadakis, who is a novelist as well as an engineer, believes robots could have sex with each other to evolve and produce superior offspring and this scary new world could be closer than we might imagine.
Mr Zarkadakis even predicts that humans could even breed with machines to create new hybrid species.
Writing for The Telegraph, he said: ‘Perhaps cyborgs of the future may involve human participation in robot sexual reproduction and the creation of new, hybrid species.’
Noel Sharkey, professor of artificial intelligence and robotics at Sheffield University, however, thinks the future could be simpler and not as 'hands on'.
While he believes that the future of artificial intelligence could be silicon and carbon-based, with digital brains in charge of organic molecular structures, he told MailOnline that robots would probably print off their offspring, much like a 3D printer can currently be used today.
He believes the robots might not be particularly intelligent and could be 'bred' by swapping software so that the code used to create robots that are particularly good at a certain task, can be combined to produce a superior offspring, which they would print out and possibly assemble.
If robots were able to mate with each other, Mr Zarkadakis believes that sex would defend them from computer viruses, just as sex between humans defends us against parasitical attacks.
Mr Zarkadakis also said that sexual activity between robots would make them more robust and accelerate their evolution so that new machines could develop faster to suit life on Earth in the future.
This evolution could happen much faster than with humans, as multiple machines could breed together to produce a ‘super’ offspring and there is no need to wait for their ‘children’ to grow up before they could reproduce.
Professor Warwick, who works at the University of Reading, said that ‘just about anything is possible’ and that there are already robots with biological brains that mix biological and technological parts.
‘This is not science fiction,’ he said.
He believes that robots capable of breeding with each other could be produced using current research and technologies but it will likely take 20 to 30 years before they could be used on Earth – and there are questions to be asked about whether this is a good idea.
As to whether humans could have sex with robots, he said it is not out of the question but it is 'scary' and currently 'a sci-fi scenario'.
However, he thinks that small steps will be taken in that direction.
Currently a lot of people have technology inside them, so research into a human/robot hybrid could had the scope to help a lot of humans.
Such research could be used to give people extra abilities and help scientists understand a lot more about the human body, such as how Alzheimer’s disease takes hold of the brain, he said.
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