say a bit about how I think my new ideas might play out in the technology of the coming twenty-five years.
My Idea for Cyberpunk
During the year 1979-1980 I wrote a novel called Software, which was to take its place as one of the very first cyberpunk novels. My new idea for the book was this:
Software Immortality: A person’s mind can be uploaded into a robot.
To make the situation colorful, I had the subject’s software extracted by having a gang of sleazy biker-type androids eat his brain!
Although the notion of uploading a human into a computer is now commonplace, when I wrote Software, it was a rather new idea. I came upon the notion of software immortality by thinking in terms of the then-new distinction between a system’s physical hardware and the software that’s running on it. This was not at all an obvious thought in 1979, it took me nearly a year to wrap my mind around it.
Although it would be nice to claim that I single-handedly invented the notion of software immortality, Wikipedia lists three SF authors who mention uploading human minds into computers before my novel Software .
In Roger Zelazny’s 1968 Lord of Light , just like in my Wetware , people save their minds as electronic data and load them into fresh tank-grown meat bodies. In Detta är verkligheten (This is reality), 1968, by the philosopher Bertil Mårtensson, people become programs in a giant VR (virtual reality) computation. And in Fredrik Pohl’s Heechee series beginning 1977, we have a hero whose wife’s mind has been uploaded into a mainframe computer.
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
My Idea for Cyberpunk
During the year 1979-1980 I wrote a novel called Software, which was to take its place as one of the very first cyberpunk novels. My new idea for the book was this:
Software Immortality: A person’s mind can be uploaded into a robot.
To make the situation colorful, I had the subject’s software extracted by having a gang of sleazy biker-type androids eat his brain!
Although the notion of uploading a human into a computer is now commonplace, when I wrote Software, it was a rather new idea. I came upon the notion of software immortality by thinking in terms of the then-new distinction between a system’s physical hardware and the software that’s running on it. This was not at all an obvious thought in 1979, it took me nearly a year to wrap my mind around it.
Although it would be nice to claim that I single-handedly invented the notion of software immortality, Wikipedia lists three SF authors who mention uploading human minds into computers before my novel Software .
In Roger Zelazny’s 1968 Lord of Light , just like in my Wetware , people save their minds as electronic data and load them into fresh tank-grown meat bodies. In Detta är verkligheten (This is reality), 1968, by the philosopher Bertil Mårtensson, people become programs in a giant VR (virtual reality) computation. And in Fredrik Pohl’s Heechee series beginning 1977, we have a hero whose wife’s mind has been uploaded into a mainframe computer.
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
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