Collected Essays (12 page)

In some ways, uploading into a mainframe VR is a less interesting notion than that of a person uploading into an individual microcomputer mind which operates a real bodies in the real world, and I think this a genuinely new move in my Software. In other words, I think I really was the first to write novels in which A person’s mind can be uploaded into a robot.

This was a farfetched enough notion in 1979-1980 that I actually had my robots’ computer mind housed in a Mr. Frostee ice-cream truck following the robots around.

We all had trouble imagining how small computers were about to get. The future is always stranger than any of us expects.

The Tech From Cyberpunk

What’s happened in the intervening quarter century? My idea has served as a metaphor, a guide, a vision. There are a number of figurative ways in which we do now upload into the machine.

In particular I’m thinking of how people upload text, pictures, audio and video. Although I can’t literally transform my personality into software, I can create a reasonable facsimile of myself online. The Web makes all the difference.

I often use the my word
lifebox
in this context to stand for a collection of data that holds a copy of a person’s life. My recent non-fiction book The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul discusses whether a lifebox emulation could ever truly be alive—and I think the answer will eventually be yes—but that’s not the issue I want to talk about today. Instead I want to focus on present-day and near-future technology.

As I say, the Web makes all the difference. The Web is something that I didn’t foresee in Software, but which William Gibson stressed in his contemporaneous Neuromancer, calling it cyberspace. That’s the other piece of cyberpunk, by the way. That is, cyberpunk is the web plus software immortality.

So what’s the big deal about the web? In the past, your life’s mementoes were but a dusty drawer of photos and diaries, or a cardboard box in a basement. But with the Web, your records can become a lifebox: a hyperlinked and searchable website mixing text, photos, sound and video.

If you’re technically inclined, you might make a personal website. If you’re a blogger like me, you create part of the lifebox on the fly, as you go along. Or, if you’re busy with other things, you might employ someone to create a lifebox for you: I think of, for instance, Stephen Wolfram’s website , which includes a very nice “scrapbook” section.

In the coming decade, there will be a very big business in lifebox-generation.

Why are online lifeboxes going to be so popular? The Web makes all the difference. If I’m blogging, then I have the gratification of being able to post to my blog right away. I can post the text of this speech, and pictures of the audience, and everyone in the world can read it, and recommend it, and post comments, and give me feedback (such as a
comment thread
debating whether I really invented software immortality.) I’m not a lonely nut. I’m part of the planetary mind. It feels good to be plugged in.

The ability to share and be heard and be connected is one reason for wanting a lifebox. But when I wrote Software, I was thinking in terms of literal, personal immortality. That’s not happening. In the literal sense, we’re not very close to transferring minds into computers.

At present we don’t have terribly strong tools for munging a lifebox’s data. But don’t underestimate the power of automated Web search. More specifically, the Search This Site box to be found on most blogs allows you to search a series of topics so that you are, in effect, interviewing the lifebox. What is an interview, after all, but applying a search engine to a data base?

A big part that’s still missing is the AI animation that’ll get my blog site to keep on generating entries after I’m dead! I can see a story idea in that, actually…

Finally I need to acknowledge that having even an artificially intelligent online copy of me somehow doesn’t seem like true immortality. But I don’t worry as much about personal immortality as I used to. The secret is to identify my inner glowing “I Am” with the universal light that fills the cosmos, and then there is no death to worry about.

But I if data won’t really make you immortal, why have a lifebox, a personal website, a photo-sharing page, a video-sharing presence, or a blog? To communicate with lots of people at once. To enable strangers to get to know you. To build a playground that people can interact with for a long time to come. To work in a new medium, to create a new kind of art.

And I would argue that technology has brought us these pleasures as part of our instinctive quest for Software Immortality.

My Ideas for Psipunk

Nowadays I’m dreaming of getting rid of computers. What are the ideas that I’m using for this? And what tech might this lead to?

I got started by thinking about what comes after the vaunted computational singularity that we may be approaching. I think most thinkers get it absolutely wrong. They think we’re heading towards an ever more digital world. I believe that the opposite is the case. Chip-based digital machines will son go the way of horse-drawn carriages, steam engines, and wrist-watches made of gears.

How would this work? I have two goals or desiderata, as the philosophers say: non-digital computational engines, and a means of interfacing with them. To wit:

Natural computation: Natural objects can do all the computation we need.

Natural Interface:
We can talk to objects.

The first of these goals is reasonable. As Wolfram has pointed out, any gnarly, chaotic natural process embodies a classical universal computation. And at the quantum level, even dull-looking objects are seething with universal quantum computations. In my recent novel Mathematicians in Love, I wrote quite a bit about naturally occurring universal computations.

The second of the goals seems harder to bring about. Achieving a natural interface with computing natural objects is hard. But science fiction is all about transmuting philosophy into funky fact, and having whatever you want. In order to imagine a world where my goals are attainable, here are the SF-ictional axioms I’m now working with:

Hylozoism: Every object is alive.

Psi: Telepathy is possible.

Hylozoism has an estimable history in philosophy, the word come from the Greek hyle, matter, and zoe, life. Hylozoism is related to the similar doctrine panpsychism , which says that every object has a mind.

As for telepathy, in my short story “Panpsychism Proved” in Mad Professor, I have a preliminary sketch of using quantum-entanglement based telepathy to talk to objects.

I combine the two axioms at the end of my novel
Postsingular
, (Tor Books, October, 2008). I show how to move through a nanomachine-based singularity into a digital-free future.

And in the sequel I’m now writing, Hylozoic, everything is alive. You’re building a stone wall, and the stones are talking to you, they’re happy, they think it’s cool to get to live half a meter off the ground, and they dig being mortared together. But, oh oh, you pissed near the stream, so now the stream gets the trowel to twist and cut your hand. Animism becomes real.

How do the objects wake up? Well, at the end of Postsingular, I give every point on Earth an infinite memory upgrade. It’s just a matter of unrolling the eighth dimension—which today’s stingy physicists have insisted on rolling into a tiny loop. Unroll the eighth dimension and make tick-marks on it for memory!

Might my new work be part of burgeoning literary movement? I don’t know, though some like-minded people are gathering in the pages of my webzine Flurb.

Call it psipunk.

The Tech From Psipunk

Okay, so we still can’t really upload ourselves into computers, but the idea of it us has led us to photo-sharing, personal web pages, social networking, and blogs. Where do hylozoism and telepathy lead?

Let’s take telepathy first. Cell phones, instant messages, and email are already bordering on telepathy. One missing thing is the ability to link into another person’s mind.

Ordinarily, I communicate an idea to you by talking or writing. I give you a kit so that you can reconstruct my idea in your own head. If I had telepathy, I could pass you a link that would let you directly access the idea ready-formed in my head, without your having to reconstruct it.

In terms of technology, this might mean an increased use of links. Why are we distributing bit-built music files? Why not have a music player that just holds links? Why not have the one platonic music file for each song and let people link into it with a micropayment structure? This was Ted Nelson’s Xanadu dream back when I was working with him at Autodesk in the 1990s. Maybe it’s finally time to make it work.

Another technological aspect of telepathy is that we imagine it as working across great distances. How can this be done? Quantum entanglement may yet lead the way. We haven’t yet begun to utilize the magic of quantum computation.

A more rudimentary instance of telepathy-like tech: cell phones that can detect and transmit subvocal speech, so you don’t have to actually talk out loud like a crazy person on the street.

Let me move on to the less familiar notion: hylozoism. As I mentioned earlier, there’s two ways in which ordinary objects are universal computers. As I discuss in my tome, The Lifebox, The Seashell and the Soul, Stephen Wolfram’s analysis of computational complexity suggests that natural processes are already carrying out universal computations. And if we take a femtoscale—rather than nanoscale—view, any object is seething with quantum computation. When I look at a stone, I think of ten octillion balls connected by springs. There’s a lot going on in any object.

Now, at present, objects are solely interested in computing themselves. But why not siphon off some of this richness for our own purposes?

I can think of one simple, easily attainable technology that shades towards hylozoism: finally giving our desktop and pocket-sized computers really good voice and gesture recognition. Let them track your eye movements as well as analyzing your voice. If your computer can simply watch and listen to you and figure out what you want, it’ll feel like as if it’s finally alive. As an example, the MIT AI lab has some robotic heads that turn and watch you walking around.

Ubiquitous computation and giving objects RFID identifiers also shades into hylozoism.

As with Software Immortality, think of Hylozoism and Telepathy not so much as things we actually expect to achieve, but as dreams to beckon us forward into a fresh wave of technology.

The future is always stranger than any of us expects.

Note on “Psipunk”

Written in April, 2007.

Published as a page on
Rudy's Blog
, 2007.

This was the text for a talk I gave at a “Cyberspace Salvations” event in Amsterdam, April, 2007. R. U. Sirius spoke as well. I was tense and keyed-up for the talk as I’d had a disagreement with one of the organizers, who’d written up a newspaper announcement of our event under the title “FS is Dead.” He’d meant to write “SF,” but he’d gotten it wrong. And I was, like, “He can’t even write the two-letter word ‘SF,’ and he’s saying my whole field is dead?” Instead of speaking extemporaneously, as I more commonly do, I read my talk, declaiming it in fury. I also gave versions of this talk at one of the monthly Dorkbot event in San Francisco in May, 2007, and at the University of Osaka in 2010.

Sex and Science Fiction

Science fiction is a mountain of metaphors, a funhouse of crooked mirrors that give us new views of our actual world.

From our genes’ point of view, we’re meat-based landcrawlers to ride around in. Imagine little double helices lounging in the hammocks of your cells. What makes us especially useful is that, now and then, we spawn off new landcrawlers with copies of the passenger genes, carrying them ever forward through time.

Putting the same point differently, if living organisms weren’t obsessed with sex, none of would be here. We’re each a link in a chain of generations, we’re dangling dollies on a slimy macramé of a trillion umbilical cords.

Of course we enjoy sex for more immediate reasons than reproduction: erotic pleasure, the orgasm, and partnership bonding. The last one is important. That’s why we talk about making love. We’re wired so that loves readily grows from the sex act.

Certainly, if reproduction were the only reason for sex, you wouldn’t be having so many orgasms. How many? Math time! Suppose you live to your eighties, and that you have seventy years of sexual activity, which makes for about 3,500 weeks. If you’re energetic enough to average three pops a week for seventy years, you’re talking about something on the order of ten thousand orgasms. All that brain-flashing to bring forth at most a couple of kids! “Oooo Mommy, you mean you and Daddy did that twice?”

So how about science fiction and sex? Where have we been, where are we headed, and how much further can we go?

One sex story I always think of is Samuel Delany’s, “Aye and Gomorrah,” about a cadre of spacers who’ve been surgically altered so that their crotches are as featureless as those of a plastic Barbie doll’s. Why? Given the amount of mutating radiation that these astronauts absorb in their space-stations, it would be too dangerous to allow them to reproduce. In the story, there are people who are sexually obsessed with the Barbie-smooth spacers. These fetishists are called frelks—a great word.

In this context, I also think of a particular story about people being sexually attracted to aliens, “And I Awoke and Found Me Here On The Cold Hill’s Side,” written by Alice Sheldon, under her nom de plume James Tiptree, Jr. Upon seeing aliens, the story’s characters have a surprising and overwhelming sense of lust. Kind of like how some of us may react to our first sight of a gay pride parade! Ah, those six-foot-tall honking-loud brides…

One reason we’re attracted to sex with other people is simply because they’re different. Gender isn’t necessarily an issue. That’s the core idea in both the Delany and the Sheldon stories: otherness is a turn-on. And any other person is, for all practical purposes, an alien, if you really think about it.