A Talk by Rudy Rucker.<\/p>\n
Presented to: I often call myself a transrealist <\/a>SF writer. This means that I turn my life and my speculations into science fiction, I watch what emerges in my novelistic laboratories, and I turn my science-fictional discoveries into scientific speculation, which in turn fuels fresh novels, on and on in an endless, rising gyre. Now and then my speculations have an impact on the real world. Today I\u2019ll give you some specific examples of science fiction affecting science fact.<\/p>\n (1) First I\u2019m going to talk about a particular idea that fueled the cyberpunk literary movement in the 1980s. 1. My Idea for Cyberpunk<\/em><\/b><\/p>\n During the year 1979-1980 I wrote a novel called Software<\/em>, which was to take its place as one of the very first cyberpunk novels. My new idea for the book was this:<\/p>\n Software Immortality<\/em>: To make the situation colorful, I had the subject\u2019s software extracted by having a gang of sleazy biker-type androids eat his brain!<\/p>\n Although the notion of uploading a human into a computer is now commonplace, when I wrote Software<\/em>, 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\u2019s physical hardware and the software that\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n 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<\/a> before my novel Software <\/em>.<\/p>\n In Roger Zelazny’s 1968 Lord of Light <\/em>, just like in my Wetware<\/em>, people save their minds as electronic data and load them into fresh tank-grown meat bodies. 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<\/em>. In other words, I think I really was <\/em>the first to write novels in which A person\u2019s mind can be uploaded into a robot.<\/em><\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n We all had trouble imagining how small computers were about to get. The future is always stranger than any of us expects.<\/p>\n 2. The Tech From Cyberpunk<\/em><\/b><\/p>\n What\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n In particular I\u2019m thinking of how people upload text, pictures, audio and video. Although I can\u2019t literally transform my personality into software, I can create a reasonable facsimile of myself online. The Web makes all the difference.<\/p>\n I often use the my word lifebox <\/b>in this context to stand for a collection of data that holds a copy of a person\u2019s life. My recent non-fiction book The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul <\/a><\/em>discusses whether a lifebox emulation could ever truly be alive\u2014and I think the answer will eventually be yes\u2014but that\u2019s not the issue I want to talk about today. Instead I want to focus on present-day and near-future technology.<\/p>\n As I say, the Web makes all the difference. The Web is something that I didn\u2019t foresee in Software<\/em>, but which William Gibson stressed in his contemporaneous Neuromancer<\/em>, calling it cyberspace. That’s the other piece of cyberpunk, by the way. That is, cyberpunk is the web plus software immortality.<\/p>\n So what’s the big deal about the web? In the past, your life\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n If you\u2019re technically inclined, you might make a personal website. If you\u2019re a blogger like me, you create part of the lifebox on the fly, as you go along. Or, if you\u2019re busy with other things, you might employ someone to create a lifebox for you: I think of, for instance, Stephen Wolfram\u2019s website <\/a>, which includes a very nice \u201cscrapbook\u201d\u009d section.<\/p>\n In the coming decade, there will be a very big business in lifebox-generation.<\/p>\n Why are online lifeboxes going to be so popular? The Web makes all the difference. If I\u2019m 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<\/a> debating whether I really invented software immortality.) I\u2019m not a lonely nut. I\u2019m part of the planetary mind. It feels good to be plugged in.<\/p>\n The ability to share and be heard and be connected is one reason for wanting a lifebox. But when I wrote Software<\/em>, I was thinking in terms of literal, personal immortality. That\u2019s not happening. In the literal <\/em>sense, we\u2019re not very close to transferring minds into computers.<\/p>\n At present we don\u2019t have terribly strong tools for munging a lifebox\u2019s data. But don\u2019t underestimate the power of automated Web search. More specifically, the Search This Site <\/em> 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?<\/p>\n A big part that\u2019s still missing is the AI animation that\u2019ll get my blog site to keep on generating entries after I\u2019m dead! I can see a story idea in that, actually…<\/p>\n Finally I need to acknowledge that having even an artificially intelligent online copy of me somehow doesn\u2019t seem like true immortality. But I don\u2019t worry as much about personal immortality as I used to. The secret is to identify my inner glowing \u201cI Am\u201d\u009d with the universal light that fills the cosmos, and then there is no death to worry about.<\/p>\n But I if data won\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n And I would argue that technology has brought us these pleasures as part of our instinctive quest for Software Immortality.<\/p>\n 3. My Ideas for Psipunk<\/em><\/b><\/p>\n Nowadays I\u2019m dreaming of getting rid of computers. What are the ideas that I\u2019m using for this? And what tech might this lead to?<\/p>\n 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\u2019re 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.<\/p>\n 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:<\/p>\n Natural computation: <\/em> Natural Interface:<\/em> 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<\/a><\/em>, I wrote quite a bit about naturally occurring universal computations. <\/p>\n 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\u2019m now working with:<\/p>\n Hylozoism<\/em>: Psi<\/em>: Hylozoism has an estimable history in philosophy, the word come from the Greek hyle<\/em>, matter, and zoe<\/em>, life. Hylozoism<\/a> is related to the similar doctrine panpsychism <\/a>, which says that every object has a mind.<\/p>\n As for telepathy, in my short story \u201cPanpsychism Proved\u201d\u009d in Mad Professor, I have a preliminary sketch of using quantum-entanglement based telepathy to talk to objects.<\/p>\n I combine the two axioms at the end of my novel Postsingular <\/em><\/a>, (Tor Books, October, 2008). I show how to move through a nanomachine-based singularity into a digital-free future.<\/p>\n And in the sequel I\u2019m now writing, Hylozoic<\/em>, everything is alive. You\u2019re building a stone wall, and the stones are talking to you, they\u2019re happy, they think it\u2019s cool to get to live half a meter off the ground, and they dig being mortared together. But, oh oh, you pissed near the stream, so now the stream gets the trowel to twist and cut your hand. Animism becomes real.<\/p>\n How do the objects wake up? Well, at the end of Postsingular, I give every point on Earth an infinite memory upgrade. It\u2019s just a matter of unrolling the eighth dimension\u2014which today\u2019s stingy physicists have insisted on rolling into a tiny loop. Unroll the eighth dimension and make tick-marks on it for memory!<\/p>\n
\nCyberspace Salvations in Amsterdam, April 11, 2007<\/a>, and
\nDorkbot in San Francisco, May 2, 2007<\/a>.<\/p>\n
\n(2) Second I\u2019m going to talk about how this idea has affected technology over the last twenty-five years.
\n(3) Third I\u2019m going to talk about some ideas that I\u2019m using in my new series of psipunk novels.
\n(4) Fourth I\u2019ll say a bit about how I think my new ideas might play out in the technology of the coming twenty-five years.<\/p>\n
\nA person\u2019s mind can be uploaded into a robot<\/b>.<\/p>\n
\nIn Detta \u00c3\u00a4r verkligheten <\/em>(This is reality), 1968, by the philosopher Bertil M\u00c3\u00a5rtensson, people become programs in a giant VR (virtual reality) computation. And in Fredrik Pohl’s Heechee <\/em>series beginning 1977, we have a hero whose wife’s mind has been uploaded into a mainframe computer.<\/p>\n
\nNatural objects can do all the computation we need.<\/b><\/p>\n
\nWe can talk to objects.<\/b><\/p>\n
\n Every object is alive.<\/b><\/p>\n
\n Telepathy is possible.<\/b><\/p>\n