Collected Essays (59 page)

I still remember how tense I was on New Year’s Eve.

Early in the day when the Millennium rolled over in Tonga, I get a mental image of the Earth as being like one of those chocolate oranges, pre-cut into time-zone-sized segments. And the segment with Tonga has worked its way free and is tumbling off alone in black space, the Sun glinting on the curved sector of its rind, its part of the South Pacific sloshing off its edges. And presumably the rest of the South Pacific is pouring down into the huge wedge-shaped gap, a thousands-of-mile-high waterfall that vaporizes into steam or even into plasma when it hits the molten nickel of the Earth’s exposed core. It’ll drain the Pacific dry. I wonder how long until the drop in the water level will be noticeable in the San Francisco Bay.

And then that evening, in a restaurant in San Francisco, I’m watching a TV to see how the thin end of the new Millennium’s wedge will impact Times Square. And, yes, the lights stay on! I was relieved and almost surprised. I think deep down it was something more fundamental than the lights going out that I’d been fearing, something as drastic as the instant decay of matter, or the Earth breaking up like a peeled orange, something like the sudden advent of the Void, the disappearance of cozy old spacetime and the start of the End Times and Armageddon. These deep, irrational fears are what the Y2K terror was all about.

When midnight hit San Francisco, my wife and I were out in the street, taking our little stand against clone-culture and it’s paranoid urgings to
stay home
. There were fireworks, big fountains of colored balls and paisley-like swirlers, then skyrocket explosions, maybe ten minutes’ worth. And then it was midnight. Green computer-controlled laser lights were fanning over the crowd, painting things on the buildings. Yes, the computers were still working. On the building closest to us, the laser kept drawing a jaggy squashed jiggle, like a picture of the soul of the machine. “Behold, our Lord and Master still liveth.”

Dozens of people were talking on cellphones. That’s very 21st Century. But so many things hadn’t changed. People still wore long pants, and thick coats, and leather shoes, and wool hats; the future hadn’t swept that stuff away, we were wearing wool and leather because our race figured out over thousands of years that they’re practical and comfortable.

So here in the early days of the 21
^st
Century, I saw a big museum exhibit of video art the other day. Slowly the cumbersome technology might move out of the way. You’d be able to buy a flat wall-hanging that is a self-contained video unit: the flat screen, the memory, the player, the solar power. A live painting. That’s one of the ways it could go.

Here in San Jose we’re in the heart of Silicon Valley and it’s all computers, all the time, everywhere. In the airport there’s a billboard from a law firm that wants to help you if your new software gets you sued for patent infringement. There’s onscreen ads before the features in the movie theaters, and more than half of the ads are from companies in the Business, all looking for people to do—what? The job descriptions didn’t even exist when I was growing up. Network administrator, software engineer, digital designer. Moloch wants warm bodies, even when we’re taking time off.

Slowly it’s getting to be more fun to look at the computer than at TV. You can find whatever you want. It’s almost too easy. A sad thought: imagine a young man who spends all his working hours programming, and then when his sex drive tells him its time to do something else, instead of going out and looking for human companionship he surfs to a porno site and polishes off that end of things with a half-hour clicking frenzy. And then he orders his take-out food delivery from the Web too. An online life. But, dammit, the resolution is so low!

The most 21st Century thing I’ve seen of late are the new reality TV shows,
Survivor
and
Big Brother
. A lot of people prefer
Survivor
; the show acquired visibility first, and it’s a little faster-paced. But I’m partial to
Big Brother
. It’s a purer set-up: there’s no cameramen in with the characters. I don’t find the characters all that likeable or interesting, mind you. But I think the idea of the show is so—21st Century. I even went to the bigbrother2000.com Web-site and looked at the live feeds for awhile. Karen and Brittany were eating lunch and talking about surveillance cameras.

It’s not too hard to imagine that in just a few years there will be as many different TV channels as there are web-pages now. And a lot of them are going to be non-stop round-the-clock “me-shows” about individual people or groups of people. Usually the people will be participating. But not necessarily. With another notch or two of technology, we’ll have small, robotic “dragonfly” cameras that fly around and spy on things. The unauthorized Pam Anderson channel!

The 21st Century. It’s just beginning. And now I’m going to dare to eat my 21st Century peach.

Note on “Web Mind”

Written 1999 and 2000.

Appeared as four columns in the online
Galaxy
magazine, 2000.

This piece started out as the notes for two talks I gave. The first talk was at a Viennese symposium with the unlikely title, “SYNWORLD playwork:hyperspace,” in May, 1999. The other talk was at a colloquium of the San Jose State Philosophy department in October, 1999.

In the spring of 2000, the editors of
Galaxy
magazine engaged me to write a regular column for a fledgling online webzine. I wrote four columns under the title “Web Mind,” and I used much of the material from my original Viennese talk. The fact of the essay being based on four columns explains why the second two parts have little thematic connection with the first two.

Lifebox Immortality

One of the most venerable dreams of science fiction is that people might become immortal by uploading their personalities into some kind of lasting storage. Once your personality is out of your body in a portable format, it could perhaps be copied onto a fresh tank-grown blank human body, onto a humanoid robot or, what the heck, onto a pelican with an amplified brain. Preserve your software, the rest is meat!

In practice, copying a brain would be very hard, for the brain isn’t in digital form. The brain’s information is stored in the geometry of its axons, dendrites and synapses, in the ongoing biochemical balances of its chemicals, and in the fleeting flow of its electrical currents. In my early cyberpunk novel
Software
, I wrote about some robots who specialized in extracting people’s personality software—by eating their brains. When one of my characters hears about the repellent process, “[His] tongue twitched, trying to flick away the imagined taste of the brain tissue, tingly with firing neurons, tart with transmitter chemicals.”

(In quantum information theory there’s a quite different kind of discussion concerning whether it would be possible to precisely copy any physical system such as a brain. The so-called No-Cloning Theorem indicates that you can’t precisely replicate a system’s quantum state without destroying the system. If you had a quantum-state replicator, you’d need to destroy a brain in order to get a quantum-precise copy of it. This said, it’s quite possible that you could create a behaviorally identical copy of a brain without having to actually copy
all
of the quantum states involved.)

In this paper I’m going to talk about a much weaker form of copying a personality. Rather than trying to exactly replicate a brain’s architecture, it might be interesting enough to simply copy all of a person’s memories, preserving the interconnections among them.

We can view a person’s memory as a hyperlinked database of sensations and facts. The memory is structured something like a website, with words, sounds and images combined into a superblog with trillions of links.

I don’t think it will be too many more years until we see a consumer product that makes it easy for a person to make a copy of their memory along these lines. This product is what I call a lifebox. (I first used the word in a short story, “Soft Death,” in
Fantasy and Science Fiction
, September, 1986).

M idea is that your lifebox will prompt you to tell it stories, and it will have enough low-level language recognition software to be able to organize your anecdotes and to ask you follow-up questions. As the interviews progress, the lifebox’s interviewer-agent harks back to things that you’ve mentioned, and creates fresh questions pairing topics together. Now and then the interviewer-agent might throw in a somewhat random or even dadaistic question to loosen you up.

As you continue working with your lifebox, it builds up a database of the facts you know and the tales you spin, along with links among them. Some of the links are explicitly made by you, others will be inferred by the lifebox software on the basis of your flow of conversation, and still other links are automatically generated by looking for matching words.

And then what?

Your lifebox will have a kind of browser software with a search engine capable of returning reasonable links into your database when prompted by spoken or written questions from other users. These might be friends, lovers or business partners checking you out, or perhaps grandchildren wanting to know what you were like.

Your lifebox will give other people a reasonably good impression of having a conversation with you. Their questions are combed for trigger words to access the lifebox information. A lifebox doesn’t pretend to be an intelligent program; we don’t expect it to reason about problems proposed to it. A lifebox is really just some compact digital memory with a little extra software. Creating these devices really shouldn’t be too hard and is already, I’d say, within the realm of possibility—it’s already common for pocket-sized devices to carry gigabytes of memory, and the terabytes won’t be long in coming.

I discussed the lifebox at some length in my Y2K work of futurology,
Saucer Wisdom
, a book in the form of a novel, framed in terms of a character named Frank Shook who has a series of glimpses into the future—thanks to some friendly time-traveling aliens who take him on a tour in their tiny flying saucer. (And, no, I’m not a UFO true believer, I just happen to think they’re cute and enjoyably archetypal.)

You might visualize a lifebox as a little black plastic thing that fits in your pocket. It comes with a a light-weight clip-on headset with a microphone and earphone. It’s completely non-technical, anyone can use a lifebox to create their life story, to make something to leave for their children and grandchildren.

In my novel, my character Frank watches an old man using a lifebox. His name is Ned. White-haired Ned is pacing in his small back yard—a concrete slab with some beds of roses—he’s talking and gesturing, wearing the headset and with the lifebox in his shirt pocket. The lifebox speaks to him in a woman’s pleasant voice.

The marketing idea behind the lifebox is that old duffers always want to write down their life story, and with a lifebox they don’t have to write, they can get by with just talking. The lifebox software is smart enough to organize the material into a shapely whole. Like an automatic ghost-writer.

The hard thing about creating your life story is that your recollections aren’t linear; they’re a tangled banyan tree of branches that split and merge. The lifebox uses hypertext links to hook together everything you tell it. Then your eventual audience can interact with your stories, interrupting and asking questions. The lifebox is almost like a simulation of you. And over time, a lifebox develops some rudimentary simulations of its individual audience members as well—the better to make them feel they’re having conversations with an intelligent mind.

To continue his observations, my character Frank and his friends skip forward in time until past when Ned has died and watch two of Ned’s grandchildren play with one of the lifebox copies he left behind.

Frank watches Ned’s grandchildren: little Billy and big Sis. The kids call the lifebox “Grandpa,” but they’re mocking it too. They’re not putting on the polite faces that kids usually show to grown-ups. Billy asks the Grandpa-lifebox about his first car, and the lifebox starts talking about an electric-powered Honda and then it mentions something about using the car for dates. Sis—little Billy calls her “pig Sis” instead of “big Sis”—asks the lifebox about the first girl Grandpa dated, and Grandpa goes off on that for awhile, and then Sis looks around to make sure Mom’s not in earshot. The coast is clear so she asks some naughty questions about Grandpa’s dates. Shrieks of laughter. “You’re a little too young to hear about that stuff,” says the Grandpa-lifebox calmly. “Let me tell you some more about the car.”

My character Frank skips a little further into the future, and he finds that lifeboxes have become a huge industry. People of all ages are using lifeboxes as a way of introducing themselves to each other. Sort of like home pages. They call the lifebox database a
context
, as in, “I’ll send you a link to my
context
.” Not that most people really want to spend the time it takes to explicitly access very much of another person’s full context. But having the context handy makes conversation much easier. In particular, it’s now finally possible for software agents to understand the content of human speech—provided that the software has access to the speakers’ contexts.

Coming back to the idea of saving off your entire personality that I was initially discussing, there is a sense in which saving only your memories is perhaps enough, as long as enough links among your memories are included. The links are important because they constitute your
sensibility
, that is, your characteristic way of jumping from one thought to the next.

On their own, your memories and links aren’t enough to generate an emulation of you. But if
another person
studies your memories and links, that other person can get into your customary frame of mind, at least for a short period of time. The reason another person can plausibly expect to emulate you is that, first of all, people are universal computers and, second of all, people are exquisitely tuned to absorbing inputs in the form of anecdotes and memories. Your memories and links can act as a special kind of software that needs to be run on a very specialized kind of hardware: another human being. Putting it a bit differently, your memories and links are an emulation code.