Steve Peterson

In February of 2016, Steve Peterson woke from a vivid and dramatic dream. Despite having no aspirations of becoming an author, he felt compelled to write down everything he had experienced. Over the next few years he developed that writing into a full novel. That dream is now the first chapter of Artificial Rebirth.

He is the chief technology officer of an artificial intelligence company, which means the questions in these books are not hypothetical to him — he spends his working life around systems that are getting better at seeming like someone. The machines in his fiction behave like machines. His interest in philosophy is what makes the rest of it uncomfortable.

The long version

As a child he was fascinated by computers, back when they ran DOS. One of his earliest computer memories is writing batch files so his favourite games would launch straight from the command prompt.

He was ten when Toy Story was released — the first entirely computer-animated film. What struck him was not the story but the implication: hidden inside a computer was the power to create whole worlds, limited only by imagination.

For his twelfth birthday his parents bought him a C++ manual and a compiler. Over the following years he added other languages, then 3D graphics and animation. He began freelancing at seventeen and has worked professionally in software since 2002.

The bus

One day, riding a city bus, he was turning the idea of digital worlds over in his head. It occurred to him that someday humans would probably be able to build digital worlds containing digital life indistinguishable from the life around us. And if we would one day have that ability, perhaps someone already had — and we are the result.

The thought kept going. There was no particular reason to assume our simulation, or the world running it, sat at the top of the stack.

He knew it was, for now, unprovable. He kept thinking about it anyway: reading what others had argued, arguing it out with family and friends. Years of that turned into the architecture underneathThe Man From N’in Galloon.

He can still be found answering simulation questions onQuora.