A world of self-improving machines has lived in fiction for more than a century. What gives that old fear new force now is not just faster chips or slicker chatbots. It is a biological idea: evolution. New research in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences argues that artificial intelligence is moving into an era of “evolvable AI,” systems that can replicate, vary and undergo selection. If that process slips beyond tight human control, the researchers say, it could create not just better software but a new stage in evolution itself. The argument starts with a simple point. Evolution does not need genes, cells or even life in the usual sense. It needs units of information that can be copied, changed and sorted by success. In biology, that success means survival and reproduction. In AI, it could mean being reused, fine-tuned, deployed, copied or recombined because one version performs better than another. Schematic overview of the processing steps and different components of a typical generative AI system. (CREDIT: PNAS) That shift matters because AI systems …