Saturday 15 January 2000

Pic of the day: "What I hope is to create a faint depiction of myself..."

"My name is R. Daneel Olivaw. I am here to help you."
This is what I said to the two rather small children in my dream this morning. I did not reflect on my name, I just knew that they were lost and needed help, and helping people was what I did. The small boy and girl had somehow got away from the rest of the school class. I helped them find the train they should take and got them aboard. But where were the rest of the class? I spied what must surely be them, on a cafeteria not far away. They must have forgotten that the train would be going in a couple of minutes, or else there must have been a change of plans. I had to get there, fast. I ran to the stairways. And into chaos. The elevators moved randomly when at all. Stairs ended in thin air, or they were covering only one level, then you had to find another room for the next stair. And there were doors everywhere, unmarked. I ran, I climbed, but I knew the time was running out ... by now the train would be pulling out from the station, and I was lost here in this meaningless maze of metal ... Caves of steel.

(R. Daneel Olivaw, robot and telepath, is one of the main characters in Isaac Asimov's story "Caves of steel", and several others. I'm not a big fan of Asimov, but I have read a couple of his books some years ago.)

When I was younger, I would sometimes take pleasure in standing or sitting completely still, unmoving, not even blinking, staring emptily into the far distance. It felt ... good, somehow. It stilled my thoughts, too. And it scared the beehives out of my friends. I looked like a wax statue ... or a robot.

The other day, I was on my way to the office, walking the car-free street. A few junkies (I presume, from their lack of joy) were standing around. One was standing completely still, unmoving, not even blinking, staring emptily into the far distance. 'He should be killed!' hissed a thought in my head. I came to my senses. 'Dear God, no. He is just scared, and trying to deal with it, like I used to. Don't listen to that thought, it's not really me!'

Heads can be pretty crowded places, sometimes.

Even so, Raymond Kurzweil thinks that our entire brain can soon be scanned and uploaded to a computer, whereupon our mind will live on inside it. He writes an article about this in the January issue of Psychology Today. Of course, this is not the first time he writes about it, so I can hardly suspect him of having downloaded my little short story, even though the first paragraphs of it and the first paragraphs of his article were suspiciously similar to me. But since the story was still in my brain, and not uploaded, I would be hard pressed to prove it. :)

Let me hasten to add that I think Kurzweil's ideas are still Science Fiction, with a huge stress on the fiction part. In particular because he depends on the existence of nanobots, microscopic machines with artificial intelligence. I have reason to think that these will never be possible. At nano scale, the physical laws act differently from what we are used to up here in the Newtonian universe. It is nice that computers double in capacity every year or so by now, but they will not be able to shrink forever. Already the cost of setting up a new manufacturing plant for microchips is prohibitive, available only to the few wealthy leaders of the pack. For each generation of chips, this cost increases. It is probable that the development will slow down, not when we reach the physical limit, but when we reach the area where competition stops.

But even if we could continue to increase the processing power of computers (and we probably will for quite a while), the nanobots are still out. The energy required for their processing power would seriously upset their function on that scale. In fact, even remote controlling millions of nanobots in your brain would mean swamping it with enough electromagnetic radiation to heat it up and ultimately kill it.

But even if we wave a fond farewell to nanobots, there is another way we could be "uploaded" to computers. By having sensors monitoring our brain activity and behavior, it could become possible over time to modify a more standard artificial intelligence in a computer by steadily feeding it our reactions to everything that happened. After a while, the artificial intelligence would start to react in a similar way to the living person. Give them the same question, and you would get a similar answer. Show them the same picture or play the same music, and even your best friend may not be able to say which reaction was from you and which from the computer. Repeat until brain stops working from natural causes. You now have a shadow personality in the supercomputer.

A shadow personality would not be the original soul in a theological or spiritual sense, but it just might be able to function in your absence: Make business decisions, flirt with electronic coworkers, answer the phone, play online roleplaying games, and write your online diary. And nobody would be the wiser, unless they came to see you in person. Yet, it would be ... a robot.

Ironically, the reason for this journal here is pretty similar to the scenario above. Only the "shadow image" of my soul that I try to create is not in computer, or even in the world-wide web of computers. No, what I hope is to create a faint depiction of myself in the soul of the reader. I do not know how long this thing will stay up after I am gone, probably it won't last long, but at least I expect some of my readers to outlive me. I try to be honest with myself and you here, because I do want a picture of the real me to live inside your mind. Not that I intend to take over your body or anything! :) But perhaps you will know me well enough to think: "Oh, Magnus would have liked this!" Or, of course, if you feel like it, you could ask yourself: "What would Magnus do?"

The answer to that question, I guess, would hardly be authoritative. But it just might be entertaining, and perhaps even thought provoking. And that was really what I wanted to do all the time, you know.
"My name is Magnus Itland. I am here to help you."