I don’t feel very comfortable with blowing my own trumpet, but I guess I should have something on this site to say who I am. I mean, why would anyone sign up as a new member if they have no reason to trust that I know what I’m doing?
My name is Steve Grand, I’m British (but currently live in Arizona), and I’ve been wrestling with computers for almost half a century; much of that time building artificial life forms, or bits of them. I’m self-taught, and very much a ‘systems thinker’. If I were forced to put myself into a category, I’d say that I’m a cyberneticist, although Wikipedia tells me I’m either a computer scientist or a roboticist (I have no idea who created the page about me, but I do have one, and therefore I must exist; ‘Wiki ergo sum’, as Descartes probably didn’t say!).
I trained as a primary school teacher, but I was terrified of children, not to mention adults, and so I quickly abandoned that and discovered computers instead, since they’re much less scary. I built my first computer in 1978 (‘built’ being far more literal in 1978 than ‘building your own PC’ is today), and went on to write a series of educational software applications. They were often the first of their kind, although, to be fair, in 1978 most software was the first of its kind. I made word processors and spreadsheets for five year-olds; that sort of thing. I also wrote some ‘adventure games’ for the BBC, associated with a TV history series and based, in computer science terms, on my observations of a housefly washing its face.
Thanks to the unfortunate break-up of the educational software company I was working for at the time, I accidentally ended up becoming a games programmer. I wrote several games that were quite innovative and successful for their time, including one about Robin Hood and another about ancient Rome.
The latter of these was published in the US by Maxis, the Sim City people, who wanted to work with me again, so I suggested an idea that eventually (in 1996) became a game called Creatures. This was an artificial life game – a virtual world whose little inhabitants, called Norns, were made out of hundreds of simulated neurons, enzymes, and genes. None of their behavior was programmed in – it was all emergent – and the result turned out to be a big hit. It spawned an enthusiastic community of fans, many of whom are still active today.
On the back of this, I went on to become a board member and CTO of the company that produced it (Cyberlife Technology Ltd., later Creature Labs). It also turned out that the scientific community was pretty interested in my work, and so, at various times, I’ve held research fellowships in cognitive science, psychology, biomimetics, and creative technologies.
Creature Labs eventually collapsed too, though, and yet again my career fell through the floor. Luckily, I had just been given two things that helped make up for the loss of self-esteem.
The first of these was an OBE, given to me by the Queen. This doesn’t mean much outside the UK, but as a qualification it added quite substantially to my second-grade swimming certificate. I was also later given an honorary doctorate, by the Open University.
The second thing was the opportunity to write my first book: Creation: life and how to make it, published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, where I explored the meaning of life, the meaning of existence, and the nature of virtuality. This period in my life allowed me to meet and befriend a number of my intellectual heroes, which was wonderful. A year or two beforehand, I’d co-organized a scientific conference, to which I invited many of them. Much to my amazement, they all came. It was quite a week.
But I was now unemployed (again), so what to do? I began to build a robot, because for some reason that seemed like a good idea at the time. One way or another, this work (which continued the theoretical work I’d done in Creatures) led to a NESTA Dream Time fellowship, and a second book (Growing Up with Lucy – How to build an android in twenty easy steps). Lucy the Robot eventually ended up in the permanent collection of the London Science Museum, which would have made nine year-old me very proud.
Another disaster, this time of my own doing, caused me to end up living on a different continent, and largely abandoning the life I had led before. But I have big ideas – about life, the universe and everything – and so, here I am, doing more or less what I’ve been doing since 1978. My thoughts have come on a long way over the past 50 years, even if my career has yet to start. I know that the things that interest me, also interest many other people. What does it mean to have a mind; to be a ‘me’ instead of just an ‘it’? I think I have some unique insights and experience regarding these things, and so it’s my duty to explore them. As an engineer, I test my ideas by building things. If they work, I was right, and if they don’t, I was wrong. If they even half work (and they certainly go that far), then I might at least be able to make something that people want to play with.
