The emotional machine

When Steve Grand developed his artificial-life computer game Creatures nine years ago, he never dreamed that 1 million people would play it and come to care deeply about the lives of their virtual pets. Creatures allowed players to design these pets, or norns, and observe how they interacted with their environment and with other norns. The norns have computer-simulated hormones and DNA. According to Grand's book "Creation: Life and How to Make it," "Creatures was probably the closest thing there has been to a new form of life on this planet in four billion years." That's a pretty startling claim, but as Grand explains in his strangely accessible and consistently surprising book, whether or not you believe it depends on your definition of what's alive. Grand -- now two years into building a 4-month-old robot orangutan named Lucy -- argues that our traditional notion of life is just now beginning to change. Grand spoke to Salon from his home outside of Bristol, England (where he works out of his garage), about what artificial life says about the soul, why emotions are so important to intelligence and why someday we might drive cars that enjoy doing their work. I was a college dropout but I trained to be a primary school teacher. I was really lazy at it and hated standing up in front of people and speaking. But the reason I got into teaching was not really because I was interested in teaching but because I was interested in children's minds and how people grow and develop. Yes, this was the '70s when I was at college.