Posthuman Blues

I'm up in the air about immortality. Maybe it will happen. Maybe humans will seize this "Singularity" thing by the reigns and conquer aging. Or maybe some of us will opt out of meat-based existence altogether, coexisting with long-lived carbon-based humanity in the form of mind-uploads. Of course, there's always the risk that I'll die before I can take advantage of such exotic future technologies.

So what I've decided to do -- more out of sense of fun than hubris -- is to leave behind a simulation of myself. It won't be sentient. It won't pass the Turing Test. But at least you'll be able to talk to it, and if I do my part well enough, it may even fool some casual users into thinking they're conversing with an authentic human being.





The idea is essentially Rudy Rucker's "lifebox" concept -- an interactive database that encapsulates its owner's psyche in spoken or text-based format. In my case, I see no damning theoretical reason this blog can't eventually become an online version of myself, able to converse with Netizens and provide a decent-enough portrait of my mindscape. (Or even talk with me, perhaps serving as a virtual doppleganger/personal assistant.)

I can see the technology necessary to create "lifebox"-style blogs arising even if the transcendent bounty of the Singularity never materializes. After all, the "intelligence" demonstrated by a hyperlinked database is illusory -- and already we have some engaging pseudo-AIs that could serve as templates for more robust future systems.

I'm not a computer scientist, so obviously I can't shoulder the burden alone. Ideally, the "mind-blog" I'm proposing will be smart enough to take cues from my behavior, reducing the amount of time I spend deliberately entering text (or talking into a computer mic). I'm relying, in part, on trends such as ubiquitous computation and exponential processing speed. Google's purported plans to blanket the country with wireless Internet service will also help, as many of the "bloggable" insights I experience occur while on the go, without even the luxury of pen and paper.

The completed product may turn out to be an unflattering caricature or -- worse still -- plain boring. Then again, those are the same pitfalls we try to avoid in "meatspace." A more organic approach to online publishing just might enable blogs to achieve something like the fractal narrative quality we associate with "stream of consciousness" or "inner monologue."