What is Creature Labs' CyberLife?

Return to Eden

Around four billion years ago, chemistry learned the art of co-operation, and as a consequence life began on this planet. Since then, the combination of random mutation and non-random selection known as evolution has pressed us onwards and upwards: ever more complex; ever more adaptable. Over the aeons, evolution gave many of us more and more powerful brains, with which we gained ever increasing control over our destiny.

A mere few thousand years ago, some of us (those who call ourselves Humans) began to understand ourselves and our world well enough to start to interfere with that process of evolution. First came agriculture, where deliberate selective breeding led to life-forms that would otherwise never have existed, such as wheat or the dairy cow. After this, the development of scientific reasoning led to a greater understanding of ourselves as machines. This in turn accelerated the technology of medicine, whose power to overturn the random accidents of evolution has now all but stopped our own natural selection in its tracks.

Very recently, through our understanding of the theory of machines, we have begun to comprehend and be able to manipulate life at a very profound level indeed. We are now ready to return to the Garden of Eden, whence we came. However, this time we will not be mere produce of the garden, but gardeners ourselves. Human knowledge has brought us to the verge of being able to create life-forms of our own.

Humans have been able to generate more humans for a very long time (and a good deal of fun has been had in the process). Never before, however, have we been in a position to create life to our own design. Scientists are already able to alter the genetic structure of existing simple organisms such as bacteria, in order to produce 'designer' life forms. We can make apples stay fresh longer and breed giant strawberries. In the future it is probable that they will be able to synthesise whole organisms from basic chemicals, creating life where there was none before. However, this is not only a long way off, it is also, in a sense, the least profound way in which we wil be able to create life. Synthetic life of this kind is merely 'life in our own image', yet carbon chemistry is only one of the ways that life can exist.

'Thinking different'

We are beginning to realise, the more we study the attributes of life, that life isn't so much a property of matter itself (so that you can only generate living things from carbon chain chemistry), but that it is a property of the organisation of matter. Much of science is currently undergoing something of a revolution in its thinking, and it seems that one consequence of this shift will be the genesis of other classes of living things, whose minds, if not whose entire bodies, lie within the memory of a digital computer and eventually, perhaps, collections of networked computers.

With CyberLife, we are making our first tentative steps towards a new form of life on this planet. Sitting in a tank, on the very PC with which these words were written, are two small and rather stupid creatures. One is called Eve, and the other, for reasons best left to another paper, is called Ron. They are not highly intelligent, and they hardly ever do as they're told (just like children). Yet they are quite easy to become attachedto, and hopefully they will have many generations of descendants, throughout the world. Some of these offspring, or their cousins, may learn to do useful jobs for people or simply to keep people entertained until the day comes when we know how to create truly intelligent, conscious artificial beings. It is also hoped that those conscious beings will find a place in their hearts for the memory of Ron and Eve.

"By the middle of this century, mankind had acquired the power to extinguish life on Earth. By the middle of the next century, he will be able to create it. Of the two, it is hard to say which places the larger burden of responsibility on our shoulders."

- Dr. Christopher G. Langton

Embedded life

Once upon a time, all machines were integrated with living things. Every plough was pulled by oxen and guided by a man; every lathe turned by hand and controlled by eye. The Industrial Revolution removed the need for muscle power, and the progress of automation has reduced our reliance on human supervision for the control of machines. However, many jobs cannot be done, or are done badly, without a living organism at the helm: a tractor can pull a larger plough than a team of oxen can, but unlike the oxen it cannot refuel itself or navigate rough terrain without a human brain to guide it. CyberLife is concerned with the re-vivification of technology. Through CyberLife we are putting the soul back into lifeless machines - not the souls of slaves, but willing spirits, who actually enjoy the tasks they are set and reward themselves for being successful.

CyberLife is thus the art of creating and embedding living things into machines, either in software or hardware. However, underlying CyberLife is a set of more fundamental principles, themselves quite far-reaching, that need to be understood by all participants if the CyberLife promise is to be fulfilled.