Steve Grand is currently teaching his children how to pee. Not the physical act of urinating — that end of the process isn’t particularly interesting to the British inventor. Rather, he’s teaching them to notice that mental niggle with which we’re all familiar, the sense of a mounting pressure in some deep place that clues us to the fact that our bladder is full and we need to do something about it, quickly.

Grand’s children — this current batch, at least — have taken their father’s name. The Grandroids, as they’re known, are bug-eyed, quadrupedal animals. They look a bit like shaven dogs with giant octopus suckers for mouths (although that may radically change in the coming months). Compared to the kinds of lavishly rendered virtual creatures that roam many contemporary video games, the Grandroids appear prehistorically basic. Appearances deceive: behind their shrill eyes tick extraordinary virtual minds — ones that, if you believe the claims of this reclusive neuro-inventor, are the closest our species has come to birthing artificial life.

Steve Grand. Photo courtesy of Steve Grand.

Before you dismiss Grand as a quack — he did flunk out of school when growing up in a cathedral town in Britain’s West Country — it’s important to know that he has precedence in this area. Grand was the designer of Creatures, a 1996 artificial life simulator in which players raised alien creatures known as Norns, teaching them how to survive, breed, and even learn some rudimentary language.

The project brought Grand widespread attention. He was invited to address a conference of researchers from the Human Genome Project. He was given an honorary doctorate. He was appointed as an Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire. Creatures also ignited an interest in artificial life for a swathe of young players, who researched cures for virtual diseases, carried out breeding experiments, formed adoption agencies, and even published scientific papers on their findings. Grand boasts that he still regularly receives letters from doctors, scientists, and developers who “owe their careers” to what they learned through the software.

Grand’s next notable project moved from the domain of pixels to that of atoms. Lucy, a robotic, legless orangutan was said to be the world’s most artificially intelligent robot of the early 2000s. Compared to the pomp of that label, Grand’s appraisal was rather more modest. Lucy was able to track people with her eyes as they moved around the room (a skill rendered rather terrifying on account of her ill-fitting skin and lidless eyes), but she was about as intelligent as a frog, he offered. Nonetheless, Grand’s book about his journey, Growing up with Lucy: How to Build an Android in Twenty Easy Steps, is now a classic text for both AI and robotics enthusiasts.