One more interview question from Arianna Dagnino in Italy. (On November 19, 2004, I'm on a panel about “Digital Eternity” Futurshow 3003 in Milano, and Ari is the moderator.)

Q 160. We humans used to think of ourselves as the key players on stage. And we want to stay at the centre of it: we’ve been using children and/or works of art and science to grasp a sense of immortality, of life that still goes on after our death. But maybe one day the human race will simply disappear to be replaced by more intelligent beings (robots?). Is there any hope for us in the long run — at least as a race, if not as individuals? What is a human being going to look like a hundred or a thousand years down the line?

A 160. As you say, even if an individual achieves personal immortality, there’s social sorts of immortality. Your genes may survive in your descendants, and your ideas may survive in the minds of others. A society has a kind of hive mind which we all participate in, and the hive mind is potentially immortal.

I think it’s very unlikely that we would be replaced by purely mechanical robots. Biology is vastly superior to mechanics — for instance, unlike machines, biological organisms have homeostasis, that is, an ability to repair themselves. But what could happen is that, on the one hand, we begin to tinker with the genome, altering our biological make up and, on the other hand, we create mechanical devices to augment our bodies. Certainly in a thousand years we can expect to be cyborgs, that is, genomically tailored biological beings with mechanical add-ons.

Amputees are already using very high-tech artificial limbs. And I don’t think a brain prosthesis is out of the question. I often write of a device that I call an “uvvy” for “universal viewer.” It’s a soft wireless computing device that rests on the nape of your neck and gives you instant cell phone abilities, internet browsing, and access to your lifebox database. At some point a person without an uvvy might not be considered a whole person at all.

But even though our bodies will be upgraded in various ways, I don’t think human nature won’t change very much. When I wrote my novel about the age of Peter Bruegel , it was borne in upon me how similar the people I see on the street are to the people in Bruegel’s paintings. My prediction is that people won’t change very much, and the overarching hive-mind of human society will also remain much the same.

We are close to having the uvvy, what with our increasingly powerful wireless devices. Cell phones have already greatly changed the details, if not the essence, of social dynamics.

What’s still missing is a seamless user interface. Actually inserting wires into one’s brain is something that people will, quite correctly, never be willing to do. But perhaps we might be able to create tightly focused magnetic fields capable of interacting with the neurons in the brain stem. More realistically, we might wear what I call “stunglasses,” which combine a heads-up display with the user’s surroundings. Lightweight sensor-equipped fingerless gloves might allow someone to “type” simply by twitching their fingers. Everyone will have an uvvy within a hundred years. Cyberspace will ooze out of the machines to permeate every aspect of daily life.

But, even so, we’ll still be the same kinds of people: lustful and greedy, noble and inspired.

Forget not the eternal verities of human nature as depicted in the supremely wise Carl Barks tales of D. Duck.

This morning daughter Georgia Rucker emailed me:

man, am i bummed!

i vow not to hear or see that chimp of a leader's voice/face for the remaining 4 years. i am SO SICK of him!

i can't help feeling mad at the red states too…. from a “center of the world” new yorker point of view, it feels like we (and calif) produce all these books, television shows, movies, fashions, which the midwest and south LAP UP, and then in return, they re-elect a freaky evangelist who is gonna do a christian clamp down!! not fair. sure, they give us some crops and vistas…but i'm scared things are gonna get really conservative. for starters, see how gay couples are being treated. 11 states banning the right for them to have partner rights??? that's nuts.

the preppy dumb people win again. (instead of preppy smart?) at least there's an END to the bush reign – 2008.

=========

My answer.

Thou sayest it, sister.

You're right. That's the thanks we get for entertaining those overweight flyover-state couch potatoes, four more years of the fuming chimp?

How to survive? Since the world won't change, I can only change myself. Not obsess over him. Start loving him? Or at least don't think about him much. I keep saying I'm gonna read the paper less. Definitely I'm going to stop reading those trembling-with-righteous-indignation editorials in the New Yorker.

There's a certain neurosis common in men over 55, of obsessing over the flaws of the government. Men seem to get it more than women. I think it's a carryover from the tribal days when if you were old you either got to be a revered elder or were dragged away from the fire and had your head bashed in. “Shuddup already, you lost, crunk.” But it's not like that anymore. Live and let live. As Richard Nixon once said, “I respect that most sacred of American rights, the freedom to do one's own thing.”

People my age did already, after all, survive Nixon, Reagan, and Bush the Elder.

The upside is that this will be great for the solidarity of the reburgeoning counterculture.

And thus I calmly, maturely, blog the great collage picture below, by Rick (anyone know a link?), showing Bush the Younger in poses matched with chimps.

And I hope to God that's the last freaking thing I'm saying about The Chimp in this blog. There's so many things that are more interesting to think about. Forget about pounding your head on the wall. Tunnel!

My God, is Bush going to win this election? I thought it was impossible, but I'm not seeing the Kerry landslide I was hoping for. And where do they get off switching Republican and Democrat to “red and blue” states? Before the Stolen Election of 2000, the colors were the other way around. Doesn't anyone even remember that? What comes after 1984? 2004!

Simmer down, old-timer.

Here's an excerpt from an email interview with me by Arianna Dagnino of Milan, Italy, for L'Espresso magazine. The topics relate to blogging.

The Q and A numbers are based on my uniform email interview numbering; I keep all the accumlated email interviews in a single online document called All the Interviews

Q 154. I'm interested in the notion of recording a person's lifelong sensory impressions on an implanted chip. Let's also suppose that the chip is equipped with a program that interviews the individual and records their internal monologue about these recorded events. Do you think this is a possible technology?

A 154. This is a good topic to ask me about, as I've often written about this concept in my science-fiction — I first presented the idea in my 1986 short story, “Soft Death”. I use the word “lifebox” to describe the kind of life-recording device you're talking about. It's a notion I'm still thinking about; in fact, I just finished writing a long nonfiction book called The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul. I also have quite a bit about lifeboxes in my 1999 futurological novel Saucer Wisdom.

To begin with, I think we need to be clear that using implanted chip technology for a lifebox is out of the question. The implanted chip is a metaphor, a visual symbol that a director might use to represent a lifebox in a movie. But in practice, there will never be a successful industry based on putting brittle hardware into people's bodies. A chip in your body would lead to computer virus attacks, a complete loss of privacy, and endless breakdowns and upgrades. Nobody is that stupid. This said, I do very strongly feel that we will soon see non-invasive lifebox technology.

A feasible near-term realization of an image-oriented lifebox would be to wear a tiny head-mounted video camera capable of uploading sounds and images to a high-volume database. The camera could be in, for instance, the frame of your glasses. A less intense approach is to use the camera in your cell phone, and to take photographs that are uploaded to a database.

Images alone don't tell your eventual audience enough. A lifebox needs to preserve some of your words, as words are so good at expressing your thoughts. As well as comments on images, you'd want to record long blocks of independent text describing your memories, ideas and fantasies.

One approach for preserving text is to record voice messages. But written messages are easier to absorb; a reader can scan through text very quickly. In either case, a cell-phone or computer-based lifebox device could assist you with this by using some rudimentary AI to ask you relevant questions. Such as this email interview.

Q 155. When do you foresee the lifebox to become a mass phenomenon, with hundreds of thousands of digital personalities? Who will care about them?

A 155. I think it's already happening in the form of blogs. Blogging is a mass phenomenon. A blog is a kind of lifebox: a digital model of the author's actions and thoughts.

Note that blogs contain both images and words — which are carefully arranged. People might like to imagine that they could create a lifebox model of themselves just by taking a hundred pictures a day or by wearing a video camera. But they'd be wrong. The pen is as mighty as the camera. And editing is essential. Without editing, the Venus de Milo is a block of marble.

The blog or the lifebox is a form of art, a kind of self-expression. Most of us aren't blessed with the ability to create art with broad appeal. Nearly everybody writes and photographs a little, but only a few get published or appear on museum walls. Why would it be any different with the lifeboxes?

If you don't analyze the situation very deeply, you might imagine that a lifeboxing tool could be so well-automated that it produces a gripping biography of anyone's life. But the production of art is an unsolvable programming program!

Part of the problem is that art is a moving target. As soon as something becomes easy, we expect more. We only have the time and energy to look at a very limited number of works by other people. This leads us to your second question, “Who will care about these lifeboxes?” Hardly anyone.

Most lifeboxes are going to be viewed only by the authors' friends and family. But this is still enough to produce a mass market for lifeboxing software and hardware. If your grandchildren can know a little more about you, then maybe you've accomplished enough.

After all, it's very common for retired people to want to write a little memoir so that their family can remember them better. Having a little cell-phone-sized device which asks you questions would be a pleasant way to carry out such a project.

Q 156. Will the use of the lifebox affect the way we make experiences so as to have memories to cherish? And what about the bad experiences, the ones we desperately want to forget?

Q 156. Let me invent a very short story.

A guy on a business trip goes to a prostitute. He uses his cell phone to take a picture of them having sex. She charges him a little extra for that, but otherwise she doesn't care. For her it's free advertising. Now the guy is originally planning to save the picture just for himself, to gloat over, but he can't resist forwarding a copy of the file to his best friend Luigi back home. But Luigi forwards the picture to the guy's wife! And then Luigi goes to visit the wife in person. The wife is so mad at her husband that she has sex with Luigi, and cell-phones her husband a photo of them in action.

This cautionary tale gives you an idea of why nobody would want an implanted lifebox. You could never be a hundred percent sure that it wasn't recording something you'd rather not publicize. It's best to keep your most personal memories in one place only: the intimate tangles of your neurons.

November 1, 2004

Here's my Halloween pumpkin.

Sylvia and I had a good time last night. Went to this show called the Haunted Barn in Hunter's Point and saw Rudy and Penny helping.

It was fun. This guy built a giant “Mousetrap” game in the backyard, this Rube Goldberg set-up. Dropped a 4,000 pound safe on a pile o punkins!

They had a Satan revival outside the Haunted House, a funhouse mirror image of Jerry Fallwell's revival outside of his “Scaremare” haunted house in Lynchburg when we lived there.

I also saw a tattoo show on Nob hill. A 54-year old woman naked with tatooes over every square millimieter. She looked like she was dressed.

Good old SF.

I love to see things like the Haunted House, all those young people, life going on. And so human-scale and festive, so noncoroporate. Just like the Middle Ages, like a Bruegel picture, my supreme idea of a good time.

And, hey, check this out, a high-snootin' fashion model from the Barneys New York, Autumn Days catalog reading my book! Thanks to John Oakes for spotting this.

Oct 22, 2004. I don't really feel like posting here every day. It's more like I'll just put up interesting things from time to time.

I'm working on the blog today because Dave Kelly couldn't read his poem that I posted in PDF, not having Adobe Acrobat, so rather than torment him with download instructions, I changed the link to a JPG.

But, like I say, I don't expect to be on here all that often.

I'm going to Italy next month to give a talk at Futurshow 3000, and that'll be good for some pix and entries. Today I'm going in to the CS Department at SJSU for my retirement party. MacQuarrie Hall 210 at 2 PM, on the extreme longshot that a potential attendee might see this in the next couple of hours. I think Sylvia and I'll go see “Motorcycle Diaries” tonight.

Best recent link is from John Walker who photographed a procession of the cows in Lignieres, Switzerland. One cow bumped another, and the bumped cow jumped all four feet into the air! Mur!

A couple of people emailed me that I should make an RSS feed for my blog so that, I gather, it would, like, ping them when I post something new.

Maybe one of these days. Right now I'm busy thinking about ideas for my new SF novel. Shh, here's the plot:

And, shh, here's a key science idea. Revealed by spycams above my desk!

I don't worry too much about people “stealing my ideas.” It's like that joke about the Polish godfather. He makes you an offer you can't understand.

I like that big “HAMPA!” Reminds me of the Peanuts strip.

October 19, 2004.

I was recently back in my old town Geneseo, New York, after a thirty years' absence. Way back when, my teaching contract there was terminated due to departmental politics. But now a math prof named Jeff Johannes is teaching a course on my transreal Geneseo novel White Light!

Jeff and his favorite knot:

I ran across my old friend Al Buzzo. Check out Buzzo's rough cut cover of “Eve of Destruction,” originally by P.F. Sloan and performed by Barry McGuire. Buzzo's cover has great topical Iraq-war lyrics:

Buzzo Rocks!

My other favorite Geneseo artist is the poet Dave Kelly. Here's a great recent poem of his called “Circle Song,” from his chapbook, When You Tell Them About Us (Igneus Press, Bedford, New Hampshire).

I led a walking tour for Jeff's class, showing off the house at 41 Oak Street where White Light was set. Shades of the Kramer Reality Tour!

The SUNY Geneseo library even had a display on me, based on a box of papers I'd given them when I left..

The prophet is honored in his home town! Thank you, Geneseo.

And, hey Sundance! Thanks for coming to my talk, for the signing, and for lunch.