Growing Up With Lucy by Steve Grand, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 拢16.99, ISBN 0297607332 Reviewed by Elizabeth Sourbut
STEVE Grand learned about androids from comic books when he was a kid. They were built from shiny titanium and were much stronger and smarter than humans.
He assumed that by the time he was an adult such machines would be commonplace. He grew up and became a programmer, designing the successful computer game Creatures. Years later, he was awarded an OBE for his work on artificial life. And still there were no androids 鈥� so he decided to build his own. Unfortunately, he quickly discovered that those sci-fi writers 鈥渨ere glossing over a few of the snags鈥�. Building a robot that can move around gracefully and think for itself is a lot harder than it seems.
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Growing Up With Lucy takes the reader through Grand鈥檚 work to date. He relates the pleasures and frustrations of working from home on a shoestring budget and explains his ideas about how the human brain functions. Some times the text gets bogged down in details, but Grand鈥檚 engaging style always carries you along.
And Lucy is a fascinating project. The robot has already been through more than 20 stages, none of them easy: she鈥檚 still very much a work in progress. Loosely modelled on an orang-utan, Lucy has only one functioning eye and no legs because she is too heavy for them. Her arms and head are powered by servos and electric motors, which require trails of wires and huge stacks of batteries. She may not be made of shiny titanium, but she is a very advanced research robot.
Building Lucy is helping Grand to understand the basic architecture of the human brain. Rather than specialise, he wants to bring many different functions together in Lucy in an attempt to create the beginnings of intelligence: a machine that can learn from experience and then apply itself to unfamiliar situations. And so, unlike the chess computer Deep Blue or Aibo the robot dog, Lucy is not programmed to do specific things. She is wired up to learn everything for herself, from scratch. Grand doesn鈥檛 expect Lucy ever to be an intellectual giant. She will never beat Deep Blue at chess, but at least she might one day be able to move her own pieces.
So, should we panic about intelligent robots taking over the world? Frankly no, says Grand. True machine intelligence, let alone consciousness, is a very long way off, and in any case 鈥渋nvasion of the terribly thoughtful and intellectual robots鈥� is not a scenario that fills him with terror. He has a point. Surely intelligence, wherever we find it, or even if we build it ourselves, is something to be welcomed.