Creatures has made artificial life a popular topic but it is a entertainment product first so the priority is on entertainment and involvement. Also the number of Norns available in the world do not allow of complex social behaviours to be created and the small gene pool makes evolution a very risky business - the wrong mutation in one or more Norns can result in the end of Nornkind. In effect to keep the world going requires a lot of top down involvement and the world is too chaotic be conducive to a self organising system. His driving passion was the quest for artificial intelligence. He saw on of the main obstacles in true artificial intelligence the structure of conventional machines, that is computers based on Von Nuemann's original designs.
All information is passed through a central processing unit that creates a bottle neck.
He claimed because the more you tried to get through the bottle neck the more things got jammed up. So we were in this paradox that if you tried to make computers smart, they got stupider. Out of frustration came one of the most powerful artificial computers ever built which cost small fortunes but run thousands of processors next to each other. Since then more powerful machines have been built using the same principles, each using processors found in desktop computers. Unfortunately these machines are no longer built for life but for death.