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
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
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