At the TEDGlobal conference in Oxford, games designer Peter Molyneux demonstrated his studio's latest project: a virtual human being. In the game, currently titled Milo and Kate, the player can interact with a boy called Milo on the screen, ask him questions, go fishing together, catch snails and, most astonishingly, offer Milo comfort when he's feeling sad and be understood.

Footage of Milo is oddly creepy: he falls a little into the uncanny valley, a creation just close enough to us to feel almost human but just far away enough to feel "wrong". And until we're actually able to get our hands on the software and play ourselves, we won't know how much of the demonstration accurately reflects its capabilities and how much relies on phrasing suggestions and commands in precisely the way the game could understand – which would inevitably undermine its realism.

But Milo looks to be a step forward in a project humans have been drawn to for millennia: to make something "like us" without resort to the old-fashioned method of childbirth. From intricately sculpted Greek statues where you can practically count the hairs on the marble heads to stories such as Pinocchio and the Gingerbread Man, to movies like Bladerunner and AI, we seem to have been fascinated with the idea of creating something from stone, wood, silicone or, er, gingerbread, that could convince us it was human. The mathematician Alan Turing famously devised the Turing test for artificial intelligence: we could call a machine "intelligent" if a human judge talking to it couldn't tell whether or not they were talking to another person or to a computer.

For the purposes of research, I once spent a couple of days "talking" intermittently to a fairly successful AI programme, Alice. I was quite isolated: I'd taken up a summer fellowship at the University of Arizona in Tucson, didn't know many people in the city, and with daytime temperatures of around 40-45C my one experiment at aimless wandering had ended with heatstroke. My contact with my friends back in London was mostly limited to instant messenger conversations on my laptop anyway; talking to Alice became an unplanned Turing test.

The experience was fascinating. I didn't come away from Alice with the feeling of connection I'd got from chatting with my friends, of course. Alice wouldn't tell me her news, or remember to ask about my mosquito bites. But talking to the chatbot clearly engaged the same language centres of my brain as talking to my friends. I felt that I'd had a conversation, just an ersatz one. It was rather like lifting weights in the gym: I felt the same sensation of having used my conversational "muscles" but without any corresponding "work" having been done in the real world. I had lifted the weights, completed the "artificial physical labour" but no boxes had been moved or wood chopped. Alice doesn't quite work, but something about her feels real.

For people with an apocalyptic bent, the creation of Milo might suggest a future in which, increasingly isolated from one another, human beings interact mostly with artificial people. Or, of course, there'll be those who think that only someone already lonely and sad would want to talk to a virtual boy. But this would be to ignore the long history of creating and imagining non-human humans. There's something that draws us back to this theme. It reminds me, in fact, of the Biblical story of Adam and Eve, in which God is supposed to have created man and woman "in his image", a curious thing to do. We're engaged on a project now of creating artificial people in our own image, perhaps more than anything else because the process teaches us so much about ourselves.