Human enhancement through evolutionary technology

The thrust of this article is this: There is a need now, more than ever before, for men to stretch their capacities in what we shall call evolutionary skills. Moreover, it is at last becoming possible technologically to enhance these skills in man by incorporating somewhat similar evolutionary skills in the machines which we design and build. However, if engineers are to develop machines with evolutionary capabilities, they will need to restructure their own way of thinking, throw out traditional ways of thinking, and find their way, through playing with evolutionary design techniques, into an ever-deepening understanding of the significance of such techniques. They must bootstrap themselves into a new kind of ``think,'' into a new climate of man-machine interaction, in which men evolve intelligent machines and intelligent machines evolve men. This new kind of think is what this article tries to unfold in an effort to spur lively support for the evolutionary direction.