Evolution's next step?

Few days ago I watched The Miracle of Love with my wife - a documentary showing whole process of life creation. From single cell to a baby. It's very impressive how everything is precisely planned. Like in the best Chinese factory :) I think that the process of creation is more challenging and advanced than the final result. It's hard to believe it all started from a single "primitive" cell. By keeping few simple rules like do everything to survive it managed to evolve to organisms we know now.

It made me thinking about the current state of the evolution. Where are we now? Maybe we are like those simple cells which are used to build something more complex? Dinosaurs or our ancestors Proconsul (extinct genus of primates) were also most advanced animals in their times and they don't exist now. Now we feel like lords of the world, but does it mean we are the last element of evolutionary chain? Our body doesn't need to evolve much because we have brains and tools so we can create everything we need to survive, We could interfere in this natural process but it requires reverse engineering of evolutionary process (what we do) and is very difficult. Usually it's easier to create something new because we understand how it works. This makes the idea so exciting because we could be creators of new life form that could replace us in the future.

Machines with consciousness and intelligence superior to human intelligence could be the next step in evolution. Their improvements wouldn't base on evolution eventually, so they could advance faster. We would change a format of replicated data. We wouldn't give them our genetic data, but pure knowledge we have gathered for all those years. They would be immortal so travelling huge distances in space would be feasible for them. Or even they could find planet similar to the Earth and "plant" life there (if it would make sense for them).

The same day, but few hours later I watched a trailer of Chappie. This movie seems to send a similar message to  a spectator. I'm looking forward to it and I hope they didn't waste so interesting topic  ;)