About the book
Steve Grand, the creator of the computer game Creatures, uses his experience building artificial life to propose an answer to what artificial life is. Working mostly alone, he wrote about 250,000 lines of code so that players could raise creatures with brains, genes and hormones that lived and bred in real time on a standard home PC. The book examines how such artificial beings are built, from their brains and bodies to the computational frameworks and philosophical guidelines behind them, and weighs the practical, social and ethical implications. Grand's view is antireductionist and antimaterialist: matter, life, mind and society are different levels of one thing, a hierarchy he suggests can be mirrored in cyberspace.
It appears on a published list of 12 books Jeff Bezos thinks everyone should read, which credits it with influencing the creation of Amazon Web Services.
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Jeff Bezos (CEO/Amazon)
“A video-game designer argues that intelligent systems can be created from the bottom up if one devises a set of primitive building blocks. The book was influential in the creation of Amazon Web Services, or AWS, the service that popularized the notion of the cloud,” Stone writes.
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