User:DrTimTaylor

Hi, I'm Tim. I work in academic and commercial artificial life and artificial intelligence.

I wrote a book (with my colleague Alan Dorin) called Rise of the Self-Replicators: Early Visions of Machines, AI and Robots That Can Reproduce and Evolve, published by Springer in 2020. You can find publication details, and also links to free author-formatted PDF and online versions of the book, at https://www.tim-taylor.com/selfrepbook/

On Wikipedia I mostly contribute to pages about artificial life and self-reproducing machines."A note on edits I made in Dec 2021-Jan 2022. Based on the extensive knowledge gained in the 6 years of researching my book, I took advantage of some free time over the Christmas break to edit 14 Wikipedia pages relating to self-reproducing machines and late 19th/early 20th century thinking about AI. Naturally I cited my book as a legitimate peer-reviewed secondary source on these topics. Unfortunately an overzealous editor took the view that my edits placed undue weight to my work and deleted every single edit I made over this period ☹ This has somewhat sapped my enthusiasm for the time being. I will come back and request these changes through the talk pages at some point though. It would be nice to see more emphasis on the influence of Darwinism on early thinking about AI reflected in these pages. What this space 👍"Drop by any time to leave me a message on my talk page!