|
Humankind now has the power to create true artificial life,
playing out Dr. Frankenstein's dream in both cyberspace and the real world. Creation
is the first major popular book to explain how. The author is a self-confessed
"Cybergod" -- a leading exponent of the first computer game to use genuine
artificial life, 'Creatures'. Steve Grand provides an
authoritative and comprehensive tour of the frontiers of this burgeoning new creation.
Surveying what has been achieved so far, he looks at future possibilities for
generating autonomous, intelligent, even conscious, living things and asks the
fundamental questions: what is life? What should the brains and bodies of these
new life forms be like? What philosophical guidelines and computational frameworks
are necessary? How much can we learn from the evolution of natural life forms?
What are the practical, social and ethical implications of this research? At
the heart of this brilliantly accessible and thought-provoking book is the author's
unique imaginative vision -- a vision based on his own experience of making some
of the most advanced artificial life currently available. The secret of success,
he argues, lies in emulating nature's way and working from the bottom up. This
groundbreaking book reveals the details of how to do this and what this new world
will mean for us both as individuals and as a species. It will challenge our whole
understanding of the meaning of life. Steve Grand was
co-founder and former director of technology at the UK-based Cyberlife Technology.
He was also the architect and chief programmer of 'Creature', the first computer
game to use real artificial life, which has nearly a million users worldwide.
He has written and lectured widely on the topic of artificial life, was nominated
by The Sunday Times as one of 'The Brains Behind the 21st Century' and
was awarded an OBE in the Millennium Honours list. He lives in Somerset with his
wife, son and baby robot orag-utan called Lucy, and runs his own company, Cyberlife
Research. |
