Scientists at Cambridge University have created a "mother robot" that can independently build its own baby robots by gluing together small, motorized plastic cubes. The mother is then able to watch how the babies "perform," -- mostly, how far they're able to travel -- take notes on which babies do the best, and make a new generation of robot babies that performs better than the last.

The babies are also pretty cute, for roving stacks of blocks.

By taking into account which characteristics in the babies made them best able to travel quickly, the mother robot was able to selectively pass down those good traits, while eliminating the bad ones, much like the process of human evolution.

According to the researchers, each robot baby was given a unique "genome" that consisted of a combination of up to five "genes" and contained all necessary information about the baby's motor commands, shape, and construction. The mother robot then "mutated" the genomes by changing up the combinations of genes in the babies that didn't perform well for the next generation. In the end, the final generation of babies performed twice as well as the first generation.

“Natural selection is basically reproduction, assessment, reproduction, assessment and so on,” lead researcher Dr. Fumiya Iida said in a statement. “That’s essentially what this robot is doing – we can actually watch the improvement and diversification of the species.”

Dr. Iida also said that he's hopeful this type of research might one day help us answer some of the big questions we have about human existence.

“One of the big questions in biology is how intelligence came about," he said. "We’re using robotics to explore this mystery. We think of robots as performing repetitive tasks...but we want to see robots that are capable of innovation and creativity.”

So are we scared, or excited? We're going with excited.