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\n[Photo credit: Bart Nagel]<\/em><\/p>\n
How does it work? You start with a large data base on what a given person was like: what they said and wrote, how they talked, and what they did. This is what I have named a lifebox<\/em>. Once you have a lifebox, the task is to equip it with an interface that allows people to talk to it. And next we want the lifebox to begin generating original material. The big surprise is that large language models and wares like ChatGPT<\/a> seem to be making this happen\u2014or at least getting a step closer. So there\u2019s a lot of buzz.<\/p>\n It\u2019s not very well-known that, starting in 1980, I was one of the very first people to talk about software immortality. By virtue of hindsight, people like to imagine that these ideas were obvious or “in the air.” They weren’t. The very word “software,” was little known.<\/p>\n I developed my ideas in the early 1970s during discussions with no less a man than Kurt G\u00f6del at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study\u2014and while writing my Rutgers University Ph. D. thesis on mathematical logic. I further refined my ideas of software immortality while studying and lecturing at the Mathematics Institute in Heidelberg, Germany, on a Humboldt Foundation grant from 1978 – 1980.<\/p>\n I wrote my novels White Light<\/em> and Software <\/em>in Heidelberg. And while I was in Heidelberg I further developed my notion of a software mind in my nonfiction book Infinity and the Mind<\/em>, which is still in print from the Princeton University Press.<\/p>\n Infinity and the Mind<\/em> has some material on my conversations had with G\u00f6del about what I was then calling robot consciousness.<\/p>\n The last time I spoke with Kurt G\u00f6del was on the telephone, in March 1977. I had been studying the problem of whether machines can think, and I had become interested in the distinction between a system\u2019s behavior and the underlying mind or consciousness, if any.<\/p>\n What had struck me was that if a machine could mimic all of our behavior, both internal and external, then it would seem that there is nothing left to be added. Body and brain fall under the heading of hardware. Habits, knowledge, self-image and the like can all be classed as software. All that is necessary for the resulting system to be alive is that it actually exist.<\/p>\n In short, I had begun to think that consciousness is really nothing more than simple existence. By way of leading up to this, I asked G\u00f6del if he believed there is a single Mind behind all the various appearances and activities of the world.<\/p>\n He replied that, yes, the Mind is the thing that is structured, but that the Mind exists independently of its individual properties.<\/p>\n I then asked if he believed that the Mind is everywhere, as opposed to being localized in the brains of people.<\/p>\n G\u00f6del replied, \u201cOf course. This is the basic mystic teaching.\u201d\u009d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Deep stuff. And the point I\u2019m making here is that the notion of software immortality was\u00a0not<\/em>\u00a0some trite, obvious thing that anyone at all could have written about. I had to dig deep and think hard to work it out. It was new.<\/p>\n This said, I have to admit that the Wikipedia\u00a0entry<\/a>\u00a0on \u201cMind Uploading in Fiction\u201d\u009d mentions some earlier SF about the topic, and yes, it does mention my novel\u00a0Software<\/em>. But I want more! I do feel I can say I was the first to write about software immortality in a semi-realistic way that matches our current technology.<\/p>\n Three or four years after publishing\u00a0Software<\/em>, I expressly introduced the notion of a\u00a0lifebox<\/em>, and I\u2019ve continued writing about this for forty years.<\/p>\n But as I say, I don\u2019t\u00a0 seem to get much credit in popular articles, and usually not even a mention. As fellow cyberpunk Bruce Sterling would say, that chaps my ass.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n Today\u2019s post is designed to build up my case. I\u2019ll include extended quotes from my writings, accompanied by comments, and as usual I\u2019ll toss in some random images I\u2019ve made. As I always say, at the surreal, transreal, synchro level, any image goes with any text.<\/p>\n My involvement with lifeboxes goes back to my Phillip K. Dick-Award novel Software<\/em>, written in 1980 and published in 1982. A race of intelligent robots called boppers have evolved on the Moon. And the boppers want to confer immorality on their designer, Cobb Anderson. To achieve this, they extract the software from Cobb\u2019s brain\u2014by, in effect, eating it and analyzing the contents. And then they put the Cobb software in control of a robot body.<\/p>\n Here\u2019s Cobb\u2019s reaction when he comes to.<\/p>\n It was still sinking in. Intellectually he had always known it was possible. A robot, or a person, has two parts: hardware and software. The hardware is the actual physical material involved, and the software is the pattern in which the material is arranged. Your brain is hardware, but the information in the brain is software. The mind… memories, habits, opinions, skills… is all software. The robots had extracted Cobb’s software and put it in control of this robot body. Everything was working perfectly, according to plan. For some reason this made Cobb angry.<\/p>\n “Immortality, my ass,” he said, kicking the bathroom door. His foot went through it.<\/p>\n The thing that bothered Cobb the most was that even though he felt <\/em>like he was all here, his brain was really <\/em>inside a computer somewhere else. Where?<\/p>\n Suddenly he knew. The Mr. Frostee truck, of course. A super-cooled bopper brain was in that truck, with Cobb’s software all coded up. It could simulate Cobb Anderson to perfection, and it monitored and controlled the robot’s actions at the speed of light.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n You\u2019ll notice something odd here. Rather than having his software running on a device inside his body, Cobb\u2019s software is running on a large supercooled computer inside a nearby ice-cream truck<\/em>! This was my early 1980s substitute for having the process run on a microprocessor in Cobb\u2019s robot body\u2014or have the software be running in the cloud. But for the sake of a good cyberpunk tale, it was kind of cool to have a large, slightly evil ice-cream truck following Cobb around.<\/p>\n In my follow-up novel Wetware<\/em> of 1988, also winner of a Phillip K. Dick Award, things get gnarlier. Rather than running your personality software on an old-school electronic computer, you run it on something called a Happy Cloak. (This name was, by the way, lifted from a William Burroughs novel.) A Happy Cloak is a chunk of moldy piezoplastic that acts as a big computer. So one way to achieve software immortality might be to transfer your personality onto a Happy Clock, and then let the Happy Cloak ride around on a meat clone of your old body. And in Freeware <\/em>and Realware<\/em>, things get still weirder. You can read all about it in the Wares<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n But let\u2019s stick to the basic idea of modeling a human personality with software. I clarified this in my 1986 story, \u201cSoft Death,\u201d\u009d which appeared in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. <\/em> I think this is the place where I coined the word lifebox<\/em>. The main character in the tale, one Doug Leckesh, has signed up with a company called Soft Death\u2014who promise him immortality. He\u2019s in the care of a tech named Lo Park.<\/p>\n Photo of Bruce Sterling here just for kicks. My fellow cyberpunk from the start.<\/p>\n Lo took a device the size of a cigarette-pack out of her desk. It had two little grilles, for microphone and speaker. \u201cWe call this a lifebox<\/em>. Basically, I want you to tell it your life story. Tell everything. It takes most people a couple of weeks.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n \u201cBut\u2026I\u2019m no writer.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n \u201cDon\u2019t worry; the lifebox has prompts built into its program. It asks questions.\u201d\u009d She flicked a switch and the lifebox hummed. \u201cGo on, Mr. Leckesh, say something to it.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2026I\u2019m not used to talking to machines.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n \u201cWhat are some of the first machines you remember, Doug?\u201d\u009d asked the lifebox. Its voice was calm, pleasant, interested. Lo nodded encouragingly, and Leckesh answered the question.<\/p>\n \u201cThe TV, and my mother\u2019s vacuum cleaner. I used to love to watch the cartoons Saturday morning\u2014Bugs Bunny was the best\u2014and Mom would always pick that time to vacuum. It made red and green static on the TV screen.\u201d\u009d Leckesh stopped and looked at the box. \u201cCan you understand me?\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n \u201cPerfectly, Doug. I want to build up a sort of network among the concepts that matter to you, so I\u2019m going to keep asking questions about some of the things you mention. I\u2019ll get back to the vacuum cleaner in a minute, but first tell me this: what did you like best about Bugs Bunny?\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n For the next couple of weeks, Leckesh took his lifebox everywhere. He talked to it at home and in the club\u2014and when his wife Abby and his friends reproved him for ignoring them, he began talking to it in a booth at Yung\u2019s bar. The lifebox was the best listener Leckesh had ever had. It remembered everything he told it, and it winnowed the key concepts out of his stories. Leckesh would respond to its prompts, or simply go off on tangents of his own. He hadn\u2019t had so much fun in years.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Lecckesh by the way is a near-anagram of Sheckley, as in Robert, my hero and mentor from age thirteen on.<\/p>\n I have another treatment of the \u201cdictated lifebox\u201d\u009d theme in my book Saucer Wisdom<\/em>. This was an odd book. It was in fact a novel starring a character called Frank Shook. Supposedly Frank Shook was a frequent saucer abductee who\u2019d arranged for a ghost writer to produce a non-fiction volume of Shook\u2019s experiences. The name of the ghost writer character? Rudy Rucker. I told you this was an odd book!<\/p>\n To make things even odder, my old writer friend Gregory Gibson) shown above in full Frank Shook mode) helped me get a book deal with Wired <\/em>for my Saucer Wisdom<\/em> book. Wired<\/em> wanted to expand from being a magazine to publishing books as well. I took Greg to a meeting with the Wired<\/em> editors and convinced them that Greg really was <\/em>the saucer abductee Frank Shook, and that my book was in fact non-fiction and not a novel at all. Good times.<\/p>\n If you read the book, you\u2019ll figure it all out… It has several useful prefaces and introductions, two of them by Bruce Sterling.<\/p>\n In any case Saucer Wisdom <\/em>has a very clear discussion of the lifebox notion.<\/p>\n The aliens show Frank Shook a mid-twenty-first-century commercial for something called a lifebox. The slogan is Remember Me<\/em>. The lifebox is a little black plastic thing the size of a pack of cigarettes and it comes with a light-weight headset with a pinhead microphone, like the kind that office workers use. The ad suggests that you can use your lifebox to create your life story, to make something to leave for your children and grandchildren.<\/p>\n Frank gets the aliens to find an old man who is actually using a lifebox. His name is Ned. They watch Ned from the saucer. Somehow the saucer can use dimensional oddities to get very close to someone but still be invisible to them. The aliens have control over their size-scale and refraction index; they can make the saucer as tiny and transparent as a contact-lens.<\/p>\n White-haired Ned is pacing in his small back yard\u2014a concrete slab with some beds of roses\u2014he\u2019s talking and gesturing, wearing the headset and with the lifebox in his shirt pocket. The sly saucer is able to get close enough to hear the sound of the lifebox: a woman\u2019s pleasant voice.<\/p>\n The marketing idea behind the lifebox is that old duffers always want to write down their life story, and with a lifebox they don\u2019t have to write, they can get by with just talking. The lifebox software is smart enough to organize the material into a shapely whole. Like an automatic ghost-writer.<\/p>\n The hard thing about creating your life story is that your recollections aren\u2019t linear; they\u2019re a tangled banyan tree of branches that split and merge. The lifebox uses hypertext links to hook together everything you tell it. Then your eventual audience can interact with your stories, interrupting and asking questions. The lifebox is almost like a simulation of you.<\/p>\n Frank Shook gets the aliens to skip forward in time until past when Ned has died. They observe Ned\u2019s grandchildren, little Billy and big Sis. They\u2019re playing with one of the lifebox copies that Frank left. The kids call the lifebox \u201cGrandpa,\u201d\u009d but they\u2019re mocking it too. They\u2019re not putting on the polite faces that kids usually show to grown-ups. Billy asks the Grandpa-lifebox about his first car, and the lifebox starts talking about an electric-powered Honda and then it mentions something about using the car for dates. Sis\u2014little Billy calls her \u201cpig Sis\u201d\u009d instead of \u201cbig Sis\u201d\u009d\u2014asks the lifebox about the first girl Grandpa dated, and Grandpa goes off on that for a while, and then Sis looks around to make sure Mom\u2019s not in earshot. The coast is clear so she asks some naughty questions. \u201cDid you and your dates do it? In the car? Did you use a rubber?\u201d\u009d Shrieks of laughter. \u201cYou\u2019re a little too young to hear about that,\u201d\u009d says the Grandpa-lifebox calmly. \u201cLet me tell you some more about the car.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n Frank and the aliens skip a little further into the future, and they find that the lifebox has become a huge industry. People of all ages are using lifeboxes as a way to introducing themselves to each other. Sort of like home pages. They call the lifebox database a context, as in, \u201cI\u2019ll link you a link to my context.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n Not that most people really want to spend the time it takes to explicitly access very much of another person\u2019s full context. But having the context handy makes conversation much easier. In particular, it\u2019s now finally possible for software agents to understand the content of human speech\u2014provided that the software has access to the speakers\u2019 contexts.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n I got very heavily into discussing lifeboxes in my tome, The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul<\/em>, published by Thunders Mouth Press in 2005, and now available from Transreal Books. If you go the book page <\/a>you can buy print or ebook copies or read it for free online.<\/p>\n By the way, the idea behind the title is that the Lifebox is a digital representation of a human, the Soul is the idea of a fully analog ethereal person, and the Seashell relates to Stephen Wolfram\u2019s idea of generating gnarly patterns by using cellular automata rules akin to those that generate the surface patterns on cone shells. The image shown here was drawn by my daughter Isabel Rucker, who did the illos for The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul.<\/em><\/p>\n And here\u2019s part of the discussion of lifeboxes in that book, preceded by a photo of me and the three kids one Easter morning in the early Seventies.<\/p>\n One of the most venerable dreams of science fiction is that people might become immortal by uploading their personalities into some kind of lasting storage. Once your personality is out of your body in a portable format, it could perhaps be copied onto a fresh tank-grown blank human body, onto a humanoid robot, or, what the heck, onto a pelican with an amplified brain. Preserve your software, the rest is meat!<\/p>\n In practice, copying a brain would be very hard, for the brain isn\u2019t in digital form. The brain\u2019s information is stored in the geometry of its axons, dendrites, and synapses, in the ongoing biochemical balances of its chemicals, and in the fleeting flow of its electrical currents. In my 1982 cyberpunk novel Software<\/em>, I wrote about some robots who specialized in extracting people\u2019s personality software\u2014by eating their brains. When one of my characters hears about the repellent process, \u201c[his] tongue twitched, trying to flick away the imagined taste of the brain tissue, tingly with firing neurons, tart with transmitter chemicals.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n Let\u2019s look at a much weaker form of copying a personality. Rather than trying to exactly replicate a brain\u2019s architecture, it might be interesting enough to simply copy all of a person\u2019s memories, preserving the interconnections among them.<\/p>\n We can view a person\u2019s memory as a hyperlinked database of sensations and facts. The memory is structured something like a Web site, with words, sounds, and images combined into a superblog with trillions of links.<\/p>\n I don\u2019t think it will be too many more years until we see a consumer product that makes it easy for a person to make a usable copy of their memory. This product is what I call a lifebox<\/em>.<\/p>\n My idea used to be that your lifebox will prompt you to tell it stories, and it will have enough low-level language recognition software to be able to organize your anecdotes and to ask you follow-up questions. As you continue working with your lifebox, it builds up a database of the facts you know and the tales you spin, along with links among them. Some of the links are explicitly made by you, others will be inferred by the lifebox software on the basis of your flow of conversation, and still other links are automatically generated by looking for matching words.<\/p>\n [As of 2023 it\u2019s evident that, instead of interviewing the person, you can use an \u201cunsupervised learning\u201d\u009d approach, and evolve a neural net algorithm that examines all of the target person\u2019s written and spoken outputs, and evolves a pattern of weights for a neural net to match the arrangements of words.]<\/p>\n And then what?<\/p>\n Your lifebox will have a kind of browser software with a search engine capable of returning reasonable links into your database when prompted by spoken or written questions from other users. These might be friends, lovers, or business partners checking you out, or perhaps grandchildren wanting to know what you were like.<\/p>\n Your lifebox will give other people a reasonably good impression of having a conversation with you. Their questions are combed for trigger words to access the lifebox information. A lifebox doesn\u2019t pretend to be an intelligent program; we don\u2019t expect it to reason about problems proposed to it. A lifebox is really just some compact digital memory with a little extra software. Creating these devices really shouldn\u2019t be too hard and is already, I\u2019d say, within the realm of possibility\u2014it\u2019s already common for pocket-size devices to carry gigabytes of memory, and the terabytes won\u2019t be long in coming.<\/p>\n There is a sense in which saving only your memories is perhaps enough, as long as enough links among your memories are included. The links are important because they constitute your sensibility, that is, your characteristic way of jumping from one thought to the next.<\/p>\n My expectation is that in not too many years, great numbers of people will be able to preserve their software by means of the lifebox. In a rudimentary kind of way, the lifebox concept is already being implemented as blogs. People post journal notes and snapshots of themselves, and if you follow a blog closely enough you can indeed get a feeling of identification with the blogger. And blogs already come with search engines that automatically provide some links. Recently the cell phone company Nokia started marketing a system called Lifeblog, whereby a person can link and record daily activities by using a camera-equipped cell phone.<\/p>\n I like the idea of a lifebox, and I\u2019d like to have one. I envision a large database with all my books, all my journals, and a connective guide-memoir\u2014with the whole thing annotated and hyperlinked. Eventually I\u2019d want to throw in some photographs\u2014I\u2019ve taken thousands over the years. And it should be feasible to endow my lifebox with interactive abilities; people could ask it questions and have it answer with appropriate links and words. My finished lifebox might take the form of a Web site, although then there\u2019d be the thorny question of how to get any recompense for the effort involved. A commercial alternative would be to market it as a set of files on a portable data storage device of some kind.<\/p>\n [I included some of this material in a paper with Leon Marvell, \u201cLifebox Immortality & How We Got There<\/a>.\u201d\u009d And Marvell adds some further speculations.]<\/p><\/blockquote>\n I have in fact made a crude lifebox in the form of an online search engine that finds user-selected target phrases in my collected writings. See Rudy\u2019s Lifebox <\/a> online. My first stab at a personal pyramid of Cheops!<\/p>\n Use case: I used the Rudy\u2019s Lifebox tool to search for \u201clifebox,\u201d\u009d and I found, aha, a great blog post I posted in 2019, \u201cTalk on Lifebox for Telepathy and Immortality.\u201d\u009d<\/a> Check it out! You might think of the 2019 post as a missing addendum to today\u2019s post, also it links to a podcast. Convenient invention, this lifebox\u2026<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/images10\/surfallisone.jpg\")
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[Photo credit: Bart Nagel]<\/em><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/images10\/Temptation_of_Saint_Anthony_small2.jpg\")
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