Steve Grand is back!

In 1996 Steve Grand dazzled the world with Creatures, a remarkable and wildly popular artificial life simulation game. In his books Creation, Life and How to Make It, and Growing Up with Lucy: How to Build an Android in Twenty Easy Steps, he shared his thoughts about synthetic life, artificial life and robotics.

You may not have heard from Steve lately, but he has been busy--both in artificial life and robotics. Sim-biosis, his underwater life-form simulation is well underway, while his Graindroids project involves building a series of intelligent robots for rent, as crowd pullers in public events and trade shows. His first robot is a five foot tall humanoid female called Grace.

"Artificial intelligence is hard!" said Grand, "harder than you might think. Teaching a robot to play chess is a breeze, but enabling it to tell the difference between a queen and a bishop, pick up one piece without knocking over any others or feel bad if it loses are much harder problems. And real life is much, much harder than chess. The things that people find really easy, and seem to learn effortlessly as babies, are precisely the things that computers find difficult or impossible to do. People sometimes worry that robots are going to take over the world, but frankly the greatest threat robots have posed to humanity so far is that they tend to be heavy and fall over a lot."

Grand's long-term vision is to breathe life back into technology. Using a biologically inspired approach to artificial intelligence, and drawing on thirty years of unique and often ground-breaking experience, he and his team aim to create robots with emotions, goals, and the ability to learn, think and act intelligently for themselves.

"We’re not the only company providing “robots” for the conference and trade show circuit," said Grand. "But the others aren’t really robots at all. Real robots are autonomous and intelligent, not programmed with a fixed sequence of actions or controlled remotely by someone else."

Grand doesn't want to spill the beans just yet, but he hints at some of the ways in which his approach is provocatively different from most:

• "We think intelligence is a property of complete living creatures and can’t be isolated. You have to build the whole being.
• "Computers can’t be intelligent, but they can be used to create other machines from which intelligence can emerge.
• "The heart is just as important as the head. Emotions and desires are fundamental to thought. Mr. Spock is a myth.
• "If it wasn’t learned, it isn’t intelligence. Programming the rules for intelligent action is a contradiction.
• "The chief goal of the brain is to reconcile the difference between how we expect the world to be and how we want it to be. Consciousness resides in a virtual world constructed by the brain for this purpose."

We can see why evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins said: "Steve Grand is the creator of what I think is the nearest approach to artificial life so far."

By all accounts, the best from Steve is yet to come.

Visit Steve Grand's blog.