Will Wright is best known as the mastermind behind Spore as well as the enormously successful The Sims and SimCity series of computer games that offer players the opportunity to manage the lives of simulated people living in virtual worlds. (The Sims is the best-selling PC game in history.) But the 49-year-old Atlanta native also has a passion for robots. In addition to building robot warriors that competed on Comedy Central's BattleBots TV program, which ran between 2000 and 2002, Wright is also a co-founder of Berkeley, Calif.–based robotics workshop, the Stupid Fun Club. The club, formed in 2000, has become an outlet for Wright's interest in robotics and artificial intelligence, not to mention for his propensity for mischief (Wright and club co-founder, filmmaker Mike Winter, have been known to let their creations loose on the street and to film bystanders' incredulous reactions).

We spoke with Wright about all things robot, such as why the world has yet to see a realistic humanoid robot and whether bots could someday reproduce without human intervention.

[An edited transcript of the interview follows.]

When did you first become interested in robotics? Was this before you became a software designer?
Yes, that's actually kind of what got me into software. As a kid, I spent a lot of time building models and, when I became a teenager, I started adding little motors to my models to help them move around. I bought my first computer in 1980 actually to connect to some of these robots and control them. That's basically when I taught myself to program and got very interested in simulation and artificial intelligence [AI].

What about robots interests you the most?
I think it's the same thing that interests me about modeling and simulation. Robots really are in some sense an attempt to model human abilities, whether they be physical or mental abilities. We think about robots as surrogates for what we can do. Robots are also interesting for what they tell us about ourselves. You don't really understand how complicated a human hand is until you try to build one. A lot of things we take for granted—for example, natural human abilities— when you go out and try to re-create them you realize how extraordinary they are. Robots represent our attempts to understand what it means to be human.

How do you define what a robot is?
I think the most workable definition is some type of a mechanical or software design that attempts to recreate human abilities. This could be a surrogate where a human is in the loop controlling it, like a bomb disposal robot, or it could be something that's fully autonomous, like Honda's ASIMO humanoid robot.

7 Comments

1. 1. Mims 05:37 PM 3/23/09

   Interesting interview - and good on Mr. Wright for emphasizing that consciousness is mostly about knowing what to ignore.

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2. 2. eco-steve 06:13 PM 3/23/09

   If Will Wright has had so much success in this domain, perhaps it is precisely because he is self-taught, learning from the complexities of the real world, rather than having been completely pre-programmed by robotics experts?

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3. 3. Kurt_Schickle 08:56 PM 3/23/09

   I think it is worth asking what Will Wright's real agenda is here. Although his work to advance gaming has been well documented, many of us have good reason to suspect he is not in favor of further advancements in robot technology. Wright, with the help of the Minnesota League of Women Voters, has been doing everything in his power to slow critical development in human modeling in robotics. Why, Mr. Wright? Why?

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4. 4. zygbot 11:37 PM 3/23/09

   Kudos to Will Wright for an insightful and innovative perspective on the nature of robots and AI, distilled from his own first-hand experiences. Hes right on that we wont truly understand the complexity of human life until we actually learn to mimic those processes mechanically. The ability to reverse engineer the human brain really will be the primary determinant for advancements in robotics and especially, humanoid robotics, in the next several decadesas it leads to the development of sophisticated machines with the ability to learn and acquire new information independently. Thoughts? "Synthetic Neural Circuits and the Humanoid Brain" at http://www.zygbotics.com/2009/03/15/biomimetic-neural-circuits-and-the-future-of-robotics/

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5. 5. Pictosurial 10:01 PM 3/25/09

   Interestingly enough, I am preparing concrete irrational documents for posterity along with a "Nouveau Mathematics" which is more relevant to the era of A.I. and the Android as it has its sources in the origins of the species... Symbolically an old man can never understand this but a child could easily absorb it and become a truer genius than any PHD. If I wanted to build the perfect Android I would have to do it in this way, leave the mecha blueprints to those who can read mecha and take on the impossible aspects of designing the internal weave structure of the Android Brane, my goal as a one of History's Painters is to provide the bloody irrational organic mimesis that will one day devour all A.I...

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6. 6. gmperkins 12:09 AM 3/29/09

   Conciousness is much more than filtering. This just happens to be an area that is being very focused on in robotics: what to pay attention to/spend more cpu cycles on. But conciousness is a complex thought and feedback process. The filtering seems to occur beforehand.
   
   He also briefly discusses whether a system can build a better system than itself. It seems unlikely since to understand "oneself" you'd have to have a meta-system for analysis/comprehension, which is not possible. Therefore, a truly "humanoid" robot would be beyond our understanding as to how it functions. Much like ourselves ;)

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7. 7. jim565 03:30 PM 4/18/10

   will make sims 3 for a console you will make more money and i bet a lot of people will buy it you rock will!!!!

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