Robots Making Robots

In a recent post on a Fistful of Euros about demography and immigration, I got into a debate about robots and how they might change things. Well, as I was speculating, it turns out that someone is developing robots which can make more robots. The person in question: Hod Lipson and his team at Cornell University:

"It makes one wonder about the future of robots and where it's going and what it means to philosophical debates today. When Asimov wrote I, Robot, could he have envisioned where things were going? He would seem fortuitous. Is the robotic future somewhat grim, like say the Terminator, where robots will eventually take over, hunt us down and try to eliminate humans or is it something a bit more optimistic like Data from Star Trek? He did have positronic brain. In either case, robots, like computers are only as good as there programming. One can only hope that the programmers put a little binary code in their ever-broadening scope of commands and abilities that merely says right or wrong."