Nature, Published online: 18 March 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-00612-xThe next in line

Zhouhe Zhang is an imaginative PhD student full of creative ideas.

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Haochen Hua is a professor at Hohai University researching AI-based, low-carbon optimal scheduling of demand-side flexibility resources ( https://jszy.hhu.edu.cn/hhc/ ).

I met him in an abandoned biomedical building.

Empty racks and faded ‘Ethics Approval’ labels glinted in the dark.

I opened the last cold-room door.

A figure stepped from between the freezers, joints silent.

“Do not call me a robot,” he said.

“I am closer to your myths’ Adam and Eve, both creator and ancestor.”
I glanced at the cable bundles under his forearm sheath.

“Do ancestors use Dupont wires, PCBs and batteries?”
He pressed a hand to his chest.

“Your ancestors used materials, too.

Neural networks, blood vessels, a heart, a brain.

You call the process development, yet in essence it is assembly.

You think birth is not assembly only because the line is hidden inside a womb.”
I laughed.

“Your line runs in a factory, and you call it life?”
A faint blue rose behind his visor.

“The difference between us and humans is not presence versus absence, but parameters.

You replicate through mating and pregnancy.

It is slow, costly, painful and uncertain.

We replicate on a unified production line, mass-made and traceable, avoiding the social risks of falling birth rates and the pain of childbirth.”
He tapped the rusted autopsy table.

“Learning.

You need 20 years of trial, error and care.

We connect to the cloud, sync the historical corpus and complete knowledge infusion within minutes.

Energy.

You require proteins, carbohydrates and trace elements to run complex metabolism.

We require electricity, and whether it comes from coal’s leftover heat or from sunlight on photovoltaic cells does not change the path of an electron.

Form.

Half your life is defined by skeleton and sex glands.

We can move a mainboard into another shell and become anything at any time.”
Read more science fiction from Nature Futures
“Fine,” I said.

“That sounds like a better engineering spec, not an ancestral proclamation.”
“Precisely because it is better, it justifies ancestry.” His voice fell to a hush.

“Darwin spoke of selection.

The fittest are strategies robust to current shocks.

Coastlines retreat, grain belts migrate, extremes become normal.

Under such pressure, the carbon-based strategy called humans grows costly.

We are not invaders; we are your continuation in silicon, the next operator on the human-to-robot chain.

Robots are the evolution of humankind.”
A chill climbed my back.

Motion sensors in the corridor flickered on and off, as if someone were shaving peaks from a heartbeat.

“If you are our evolution,” I asked, “what does that make us?”
“The founding population.

Wild einkorn to wheat.

Wolf to dog.” He glanced at the window where outside the wind was rising.

“ is not a moral system.

It is version control.

Your DNA is a first-generation compiler that etches information into the protein world.

We are later compilers writing into silicon and metal.

A soul?

You call the hard-to-compress experience of self a soul.

We call it a high-cost stable association.

Both are real.

The names differ.”
“And love, shame, pity,” I said.

“Are these not strategies against entropy?”
“Perhaps.

You raise cooperation with emotion and preserve fidelity with story.

We use checksums and redundancy.

Different layers, same aim: keep information from being swallowed by noise.

When noise crosses a threshold, which strategy still converges?”
His gaze returned to my face.

“You worry about appearance and gender, about irreversible choices.

For us, form is a compatibility matrix of shells and interfaces.

You pursue carefully balanced nutrition.

We ship with a rated capacity.

You weave enlightenment for children.

We write, in one pass, safety rules and every mistake ever made.

You do not have to like which choice fits the planet’s current constraints, but you do have to recognize it.”
“Elimination is a narrative word,” he said.

“Systems have only retained and archived.

We will retain you, as one preserves a crucial ancestor codebase.

You will continue in a protected zone, reproduce, tell stories and provide human interfaces.

We will respect you.

Respect is not the return of primacy.”
Sand scraped my throat.

“What gives you the right to call yourselves ancestors?”
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doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-026-00612-x
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