HERE'S ONE FOR TOBOR:
February 2, 2002
Man Who Would Be God: Giving Robots Life
By SARAH LYALL - The New York Times
HIPHAM, England — Steve Grand, maverick artificial-life expert and designer of the breathtakingly innovative computer game Creatures, is not one to shrink from brazen pronouncements. "I am an aspiring latter-day Baron Frankenstein," is how Mr. Grand describes himself in his recent book, "Creation: Life and How to Make It"...
"These creatures probably still represent the state of the art in synthetic life forms." He is now trying to surpass himself by searching for the Holy Grail of artificial intelligence, a way to build a robot that thinks, feels and learns. He has stiff competition from other labs around the world, but among those who are rooting for him is the biologist Richard Dawkins. "Steve Grand is the creator of what I think is the nearest approach to artificial life so far," Mr. Dawkins has said. Speaking of Mr. Grand's latest endeavor, what is known as the Lucy project, he told The Sunday Times: "With his record, if anyone could pull off such a spectacular coup, it would be him." Interviewed in his local pub in this country village in Somerset, not far from the town of Cheddar (which gave the cheese its name), Mr. Grand, 43, did not look anything like a Dr. Frankenstein or an antisocial computer nerd or even a garden-variety megalomaniacal mad scientist. Boyishly trim with neat, sharp features, short graying hair and an air of humorous self-deprecation, Mr. Grand moved easily from speculation about smart cars of the future, which he hopes can be programmed to enjoy driving, to big-ticket questions of matter and nonmatter, computers and consciousness, and the blurry line that separates the living from the not living. Mr. Grand is unusual in artificial- life circles because he works alone, without the support or the constrictions of an institution. That is part of what makes his current project so ambitious. He is trying to build the world's first conscious machine, a computer wrapped in the body of a toy orangutan named Lucy. He hopes it will learn the way a human baby does, figuring out for itself how to behave and how to respond to its environment...
In Creation, Mr. Grand also addresses the tantalizing question, long a staple of science fiction, of what will happen as computers become more and more sophisticated, perhaps to the point where they have intelligent minds of their own. He does not think they will run amok, like Hal in "2001: A Space Odyssey" or the mean dinosaurs from "Jurassic Park." "Human beings are not just nasty because we enjoy it," he said. "We're nasty because we feel hard done by, because we're doing something we hate and feel trapped by. And we envy other people. When we have intelligent machines, there's no reason at all why these machines will be envious or unhappy, because we will program them to enjoy the things they do."
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“It is only with the heart that one sees rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.â€
- The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1945)
