Collected Essays (60 page)

Certainly exchanging memories and links is more pleasant than having one’s brain microtomed and chemically analyzed, as in my novel
Software
.

I sometimes study an author’s writings or an artist’s works so intensely that I begin to at least imagine that I can think like them. I even have a special word I made up for this kind of emulation; I call it
twinking
. To twink someone is to simulate them internally. Putting it in an older style of language, to twink someone is to let their spirit briefly inhabit you. A twinker is, if you will, like a spiritualistic medium channeling a personality.

Over the years I’ve twinked my favorite writers, scientists, musicians and artists: Robert Sheckley, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Thomas Pynchon, Frank Zappa, Kurt Gödel, Georg Cantor, Jorge Luis Borges, Edgar Allan Poe, Joey Ramone, Phil Dick, Peter Bruegel, etc. The immortality of the great ones results from faithful twinking by their aficionados.

Even without the lifebox, if someone doesn’t happen to be an author, they can make themselves twinkable simply by appearing in films. Thomas Pynchon captures this idea in a passage of his masterpiece
Gravity’s Rainbow
, where he’s imagining the state of mind of the 1930s bank-robber John Dillinger right before he was gunned down by federal agents outside the Biograph movie theater in Chicago, having just seen
Manhattan Melodrama
starring Clark Gable.

John Dillinger, at the end, found a few seconds’ strange mercy in the movie images that hadn’t quite yet faded from his eyeballs—Clark Gable going off unregenerate to fry in the chair, voices gentle out of the deathrow steel
so long, Blackie
…there was still for the doomed man some shift of personality in effect—the way you’ve felt for a little while afterward in the real muscles of your face and voice, that you were Gable, the ironic eyebrows, the proud, shining, snakelike head—to help Dillinger through the bushwhacking, and a little easier into death.

The effect of the lifebox would be to make such immortality accessible to a wider range of people. Most of us aren’t going to appear in any movies, and even writing a book is quite hard. Again, a key difficulty in writing any kind of book is that you somehow have to flatten the great branching fractal of your thoughts into a long line of words. Writing means converting a hypertext structure into a sequential row—it can be hard even to know where to begin.

As I’ve been saying, my expectation is that in not too many years, great numbers of people will be able to preserve their software by means of the lifebox. In a rudimentary kind of way, the lifebox concept is already being implemented as blogs. People post journal notes and snapshots of themselves, and if you follow a blog closely enough you can indeed get a feeling of identification with the blogger. And many blogs already come with search engines that automatically provide some links. Recently the cell-phone company Nokia started marketing a system called
Lifeblog
, whereby a person can link and record their daily activities by using a camera-equipped cell phone. And I understand that the Hallmark corporation, known for greeting cards, is researching an on-line memory-keeping product.

Like any other form of creative endeavor, filling up one’s lifebox will involve dedication and a fair amount of time, and not everyone will feel like doing it. And some people are tongue-tied or inhibited enough to have trouble telling stories about themselves. Certainly a lifebox can include some therapist-like routines for encouraging its more recalcitrant users to talk. But lifeboxes won’t work for everyone.

What about some science fictional instant personality scanner, a superscanner that you wave across your skull and thereby get a copy of your whole personality with no effort at all? Or, lacking that, how about a slicer-dicer that purees your brain right after you die and extracts your personality like the brain-eaters of
Software
? I’m not at all sure that this kind of technology will ever exist. In the end, the synaptic structures and biochemical reactions of a living brain may prove too delicate to capture from the outside.

I like the idea of a lifebox, and I have already made a primitive version of Rudy’s Lifebox myself, which you can find online. My personal pyramid of Cheops. I see the ultimate version of my lifebox as a website or a cloud-based application that includes a large database with all my books, all my journals, some years of blog entries, and a connective guide/memoir—with the whole thing annotated and hyperlinked. And I might as well throw in my photographs, videos and sound-recordings—I’ve taken thousands of photos over the years.

It should be feasible to endow my lifebox with enough interactive abilities; people could ask it questions and have it answer with appropriate links and words. Off-the-shelf Google site-search box does a fairly good job at finding word matches. And it may be that the Wolfram Alpha search engine—which purportedly has some measure of natural language comprehension—can soon do better.

For a fully effective user experience, I’d want my lifebox to remember the people who talked to it. This is standard technology—a user signs onto a site, and the site remembers the interactions that the user has. In effect, the lifebox creates mini-lifebox models of the people it talks to, remembering their interests, perhaps interviewing them a bit, and never accidentally telling the same story twice—unless prompted to.

If I’m dead by the time my lifebox begins receiving heavy usage, then in some sense I’m not all that worried about getting paid by my users. Like any web or cloud-based application, one could charge a subscription fee, or interrupt the information with ads.

If I use my lifebox while I’m still alive, some other options arise. I might start letting my lifebox carry out those interview or speaking gigs that I don’t have the time or energy to fulfill. Given that many bits of this paper, “Lifebox Immortality,” are in fact excerpted and reshuffled from my other writings, it’s conceivable that my lifebox actually wrote this paper.

Moving on, my lifebox could be equipped to actively go out and post things on social networking sites, raising my profile on the web and perhaps garnering more sales of my books and more in-person speaking invitations. This could of course go too far—what if my lifebox became so good at emulating me that people preferred its outputs to those of own creaky and aging self?

But I don’t, however, see any near-term lifebox as being a living copy of its creator. At this point, my lifebox will just be another work of art, not so different from a bookshelf of collected works or, once again, like a searchable blog.

Looking further ahead, how
would
one go about creating a human-like intelligence? That is, how would we animate a lifebox so as to have an artificial person?

A short answer is that, given that our brains have acquired their inherent structures by the process of evolution, the likeliest method for creating intelligent software is via a simulated process of evolution within the virtual world of a computer. There is, however, a difficulty with simulated evolution—even with the best computers imaginable, it may take an exceedingly long time to bear fruit.

An alternate hope is that there may yet be some fairly simple model of the working of human consciousness which we can model and implement in the coming decades. The best idea for a model that I’ve seen is in a book by Jeff Hawkins and Sandra Blakeslee,
On Intelligence
(Times Books, 2004). Their model describes a directed evolution based upon a rich data base that develops by continually moving to higher-level symbol systems.

For now in any case, it would help the progress of AI to create a number of lifeboxes. It may well be that these constructs can in fact serve as hosts or culture mediums where we can develop fully conscious and intelligent minds.

But for now, even without an intelligent spark, a lifebox can be exceedingly lifelike. At the very least—as my friend Leon Marvell has pointed out in our joint essay—we’ve invented a great new medium.

Note on “Lifebox Immortality”

Written in 2009.

Appeared as part of “Lifebox Immortality and How We Got There,” co-authored with Leon Marvell, in Sean Cubitt and Paul Thomas, eds.,
Re:Live Media Art Histories 2009
. Also appeared in
H++
, December 2010.

I’ve been talking about my lifebox concept for years. In 2009, I wrote up my ideas for a presentation that I gave with Leon Marvell at a conference in Melbourne, Australia. First I talked, and then Leon talked, and our paper had two parts, mine and his. Only my part appears here. The paper appeared in a free online volume of proceedings, and I later sold my part to an online zine called H++, edited by my old
Mondo 2000
co-conspirator, R. U. Sirius.

I see the lifebox as a commercial concept which will come to fruition rather soon. From time to time I broach the subject to the entrepreneurial types that I meet, but they never seem to take the idea very seriously. As I mention in the article, as a proof of principle I set up a crude lifebox of myself
online
and it does a Google search of the rather large amount of my writings to be found on my website.

Selling Your Personality

Types of Profitable Information

How have people profited from providing information in the past, and how will we do this in the future? Let’s think in terms of four overlapping categories of information: art, software, data, and services.

Art
means novels, essays, painting, music, film, and the like. Let’s include scientific writings here as well.

Software
is dynamic and interactive, as opposed to the more static forms of art. We think of word-processers, web browsers, or videogames.

Data
refers to distilled, searched-out information that has been mined and refined from the web or the physical world.

Services
include readings, musical performances and shows, as well as lectures, classes, and consultations.

I myself have made my living in providing information for my whole life:
Art:
Novels, popular science books, paintings, photographs.
Software
: Interactive programs involving chaos and cellular automata.
Data
: Blogging, editing anthologies, publishing a webzine.
Services
: A career as a professor, lecturer, and consultant.

Art

The old model for an art career is that you create things and sell the originals or copies of the information. You’re paid directly by users or via a royalty arrangement with a publisher, gallery or producer.

But now, although art is still sold in material form, the focus is on online distribution, as in electronic books, music files, images, or videos.

Electronic distribution channels have lower fixed costs than print.
POD (print-on-demand) and ebooks
can be produced with no costs of carrying an inventory. With POD and ebooks, self-publishing is a more realistic concept than in earlier times. I’ve experimented with producing a
high quality art book
for sale on Lulu. It was interesting, but I only sold a few copies.

With books becoming lightweight pieces of electronic information, some authors are tempted to give their books away, licensing them as Creative Commons releases, as I’ve done with my books,
The Hollow Earth
,
The Ware Tetralogy
, and
Postsingular
. The science fiction writer Cory Doctorow is known for advocating this approach. Artists and authors have three reasons for giving away electronic copies of their works.

Upgrades
. A number of readers will sample a free electronic version and then either buy a commercial electronic version or buy a hardcopy paper book.

Branding
. Getting people to read your work builds the brand value of your name. This can lead to various commercial offers to speak, to consult, or to write.

Immortality.
Setting aside any financial considerations, the simple fact is that authors want to be read, and they want their books to stay available indefinitely. A Creative Commons release provides a touch of artistic immortality.

Software

When I worked for Autodesk in the 1990s, the sole model of selling software was that of putting the software onto disks and selling the disks in boxes. But now only a very few high-end software products are sold on disks. Most software is distributed online by a download that is, at least initially, free. How does this software earn money?

Trial basis.
Stops working after a few weeks unless a license is bought.

Upgrades
. Offers extra features at a cost.

Begging
. Continues working but repeatedly asks for donations.

Ads
. Carries commercial advertising, possibly from third parties.

Branding
. Builds a brand awareness of the producer, creates large user-base.

Sellout
. Entices a deep-pocketed speculator to buy the software company.

Stepping back a little, it’s worth noting that, in an older sense, recipes, chemical formulae, and trade secrets are a type of software as well. And, looking ahead, genomic data is a type of software too—which is often known as
wetware
, as in the novels of my
Ware Tetralogy
.

The Not So Long Tail

It’s worth noting that for the vast majority of artists or software producers, the pay for selling any kind of intellectual property will always be low. The earnings are subject to a so-called scaling law, also know known as an inverse power law distribution. The scaling law applies to all natural phenomena—to the populations of cities, the number of hits on websites, the heights of mountains, the number of friends that people have, the areas of lakes, and the sales of books.