Collected Essays

by Rucker, Rudy

  Let’s try a little introspection. Look at something and think, “What does that remind me of ?”—and that’s a the link from that item. And then think about the link and see what intermediate links might branch off of that, just keep doing that with things, asking what comes off the line of the link. Try to think about how you could do that as a web page.

  The interface-design point to make here is that the Web would be a better match for the mind if the links were somehow set up in a different way. If one simply has pages leading to pages leading to pages, then we have a structure that’s a little like a tip-branching tree. A true fractal should branch all over. The difference between the two is that the trunk of the tip-branching tree is a featureless line, while the trunk of the branch-branching tree is as woolly as the rest of the figure. Only the latter is fully self-similar, i.e. only the latter has the property that each of its parts resembles the whole.

  In some sense you never can get started drawing a true fractal, because you always have to put in another bump before the bump you want to get to. And this is similar to the experience you have when you try to fully explain any aspect of your mindscape.

  This is similar to what happens in your thought process, you start to think of something so have a sort of hyperlink to it, but if you want to explain how you get from here to there, there is a detour that you have to take, and then you want to explain how you get to the detour and there is another detour.

  Of course we do in fact manage to think things and to say things without stumbling over crippling infinite regresses. So the instant jump of a web hyperjump is not wholly unrealistic. I think the fit between Web and Mind would be better if, let us say, every hyperjump button had the ability to display a list of the items on the page you might go to. Thus, you might click on a button labeled, let’s say, Peter Bruegel. And rather than jumping right away, the program might offer you some suboptions, and when you highlight one of those, you get subsuboptions and so on. I’m imagining a sequence like this:

  Peter Bruegel

  Go to Peter Bruegel

  Detour to Painters

  Detour to Netherlands

  Detour to Sixteenth Century

  Go to Sixteenth Century

  Detour to Inquisition

  Detour to Shakespeare

  Detour to Renaissance

  Go To Renaissance

  Detour to Perspective

  Etc.

  Online Immortality

  I’ve talked about the idea that the Web has a branching, fractal structure reminiscent of the patterns of the human mind. There are two topics that come out of this: first of all, might we hope to somehow replicate a human mind as a Web site, and secondly, might the Web itself someday “wake up” and start behaving like a huge planetary mind?

  As I already mentioned, the first topic, which we might call cyberimmortality, has to do with the dream of getting a software representation of a human mind. This process is often called uploading—the idea is that someone might hope to upload the software of their personality to the great Net God of the ether.

  Let me briefly summarize my thoughts on cyberimmortality. My feeling is that in order to get a software model of some person’s mind—let’s call the person Sid in honor of the lamented Sid Vicious (and wasn’t The Filth and the Fury a fun movie?)—you’d need to get several levels of information about Sid. At the highest level, you’d want to build up a database of Sid’s memories. Sid might carry around a little interactive audio device that I call a lifebox. Over the course of a few months Sid would tell the lifebox all the stories about his life that he could remember. The lifebox would organize the fractal flow of information into something like a web page, occasionally prompting Sid for new links and new topics.

  And then would come the tasty, monster-SF part. To really get a good model of Sid’s mind we might well want to get an electrical, physical and chemical map of his brain. This could involve non-invasive things like PET scans and SQUIDs and computer tomography or, more graphically, it could involve slicing up Sid’s brain. And then running it through a blender to get out all the chemicals. Though of course it may well be that by the technique becomes practical you won’t really have to slice up the uploadee’s brain, let alone chew it up with your power mechanical android jaws.

  As I mention elsewhere in this volume, the last thought brings back a fond memory of careening down an Austin street with John Shirley, and John leaning out the window to holler, “Y’all ever ate any live brains?”

  Could a computer program ever be alive? Yawn. Of course it could. This question’s been a dead issue for years. For those who slept through the second half of the 20th century, Kurt Gödel proved that although we can’t explicitly describe a computer program as intelligent as ourselves, we can indeed set up a situation in which an intelligent program can evolve.

  What about the feeling that there’s more to your consciousness than the software of your brain? Well, that feeling you have is, in my humble opinion, the simple experiencing of raw existence. Aquinas once said, “God is pure existence unmodified.” Everything that exists shares in this feeling. As the Zen guys put it, the universal rain moistens all creatures. Nothing stays “dry.” Everything in the world is lit up, each object is just another illuminated bit of stained glass, with the great SUN shining upon us all from some higher dimension. And that’s about as lucid as I feel like being on this subject today.

  The topic of whether the Web might ever be like a mind falls under the heading of “emergent intelligence.” It’s a somewhat hoary SF theme, the idea that some day the Machine will Wake Up. Often the new planetary computer mind is thought of as having fairly sinister intentions. But why should it, really?

  After all, the computer already dominates Earth. So there’s really nothing to overthrow, no power to seize. We’re the cells the computer is made up of. You don’t take over your body and say, “All right, I’m going to kill all of you skin and muscle and bone and nerve cells so that I can reign supreme!” Your body IS your cells. By the same token, the planetary computer intelligence IS the machines on our desks that we are continually feeding with bits and gobbets of info.

  Continuing the analogy, it is true that we try and encourage some kinds of cells at the expense of others. We want more muscle and brain and less fat and tumors. Might the planetary Web mind decide to freeze out certain elements? Indirectly this already happens: Spammers get their accounts cancelled, not because of anything they stand for, but because they are bad for the efficiency of the Web. Pages that stick to outdated HTML coding standards become obsolete and unvisited, because they don’t support the evolution of the Web.

  That’s enough deep thinking for today. Now for something trivial.

  Anyone who owns a computer has noticed the insane number of connector wires that he or she has under the desk. When I got my first computers I was kind of happy about all the wires, and proud that I knew what they were all for. It made me feel high-tech to plug them in.

  Now, what with a variety of additional peripherals kicking around, I have so many wires that it almost seems like the wires, in and of themselves, might someday break into emergent intelligence. Twining around my ankles and pulling me beneath the desk.

  Is there some kind of fundamental principle at work? Well, each new device you get will usually require a power wire and at least one data wire leading to another devices. A few devices (like a keyboard) don’t have their own power wire. But other devices (like a scanner with a pass-through port to the printer or a telephone which connects to the wall and to your computer) will have an extra data wires. And once you get to enough power-driven devices you need to add extra wires in the form of multiple-outlet extension cords. So let’s say there’s an average of 2.5 wires per device.

  Looking around my desk, I see a printer, monitor, keyboard, mouse, laptop computer, main computer, three speakers, a speaker controller, external modem, two uninterruptable power sources, two phones, and an answering machine. That’s seve
nteen devices, which, according to my formula, makes for forty-two and a half wires. And looking at the snake-pit under my desk, that’s indeed what it looks like.

  Will the coming of wireless devices clear away the wires? Maybe—but at what cost? Don’t you have the feeling that all this radiation might be bad for you? I remember years ago reading a Heinlein story that argued that the ambient radio-frequency radiation would lead to a gradual degeneration of the human race. And that was written well before the era when you can soft-boil your brain with your cell-phone. Ever notice how the warnings that come with your cell-phone mention a danger of burning yourself if the naked metal of the antenna touches your skin?

  The New Century

  Just now I started eating a peach and I noticed it has a Web address on it. The URL is on a little sticker; it urges me to go to e-zrecipies.com and find instructions for peach pie. And this sets me thinking to the fact that, yes, this really is the 21st Century.

  When I go in to teach my classes at San Jose State University, I see students with their head shaved on the sides but hair on top, the side parts with a red stripe, the hair on top raspberry and moussed into spikes like Jughead’s crown. These are just regular students. These are the hairdos I used to see in comic books that tried to show the 21st Century. But now they’re here and nobody questions them. It’s time.

  In the Old Navy store near Union Square in San Francisco they have twenty pairs of mechanical legs hanging from the ceiling, marching in place, wearing Old Navy pants. All the belts and gears of the devices very visible. And in the Levi’s store a block or two away, you move from level to level in a giant open-mesh industrial elevator, also with all its gears and cables exposed. Gears and machinery are quaint and nostalgic for the 21st Century. We’re all through trying to be21st Century. We are 21st Century.

  I bought a 21st Century toilet a couple of months back. It looks quite a bit like a toilet I would have bought last year. But now it’s the year 2000, and the only kind of new toilet I can buy anymore is, by definition, a 21st Century toilet. We’re in science-fiction land.

  What ever happened with the Y2K crisis anyway? What a hoax, what a scam, what a rip-off. Where are all those self-appointed experts now? Off counting their money. You can sell people anything if you tell them it’s for public safety. Did you notice that nothing at all happened to the Third World countries that didn’t bother having a Y2K-preparedness program?

  I still remember how tense I was on New Year’s Eve.

  Early in the day when the Millennium rolled over in Tonga, I get a mental image of the Earth as being like one of those chocolate oranges, pre-cut into time-zone-sized segments. And the segment with Tonga has worked its way free and is tumbling off alone in black space, the Sun glinting on the curved sector of its rind, its part of the South Pacific sloshing off its edges. And presumably the rest of the South Pacific is pouring down into the huge wedge-shaped gap, a thousands-of-mile-high waterfall that vaporizes into steam or even into plasma when it hits the molten nickel of the Earth’s exposed core. It’ll drain the Pacific dry. I wonder how long until the drop in the water level will be noticeable in the San Francisco Bay.

  And then that evening, in a restaurant in San Francisco, I’m watching a TV to see how the thin end of the new Millennium’s wedge will impact Times Square. And, yes, the lights stay on! I was relieved and almost surprised. I think deep down it was something more fundamental than the lights going out that I’d been fearing, something as drastic as the instant decay of matter, or the Earth breaking up like a peeled orange, something like the sudden advent of the Void, the disappearance of cozy old spacetime and the start of the End Times and Armageddon. These deep, irrational fears are what the Y2K terror was all about.

  When midnight hit San Francisco, my wife and I were out in the street, taking our little stand against clone-culture and it’s paranoid urgings to stay home. There were fireworks, big fountains of colored balls and paisley-like swirlers, then skyrocket explosions, maybe ten minutes’ worth. And then it was midnight. Green computer-controlled laser lights were fanning over the crowd, painting things on the buildings. Yes, the computers were still working. On the building closest to us, the laser kept drawing a jaggy squashed jiggle, like a picture of the soul of the machine. “Behold, our Lord and Master still liveth.”

  Dozens of people were talking on cellphones. That’s very 21st Century. But so many things hadn’t changed. People still wore long pants, and thick coats, and leather shoes, and wool hats; the future hadn’t swept that stuff away, we were wearing wool and leather because our race figured out over thousands of years that they’re practical and comfortable.

  So here in the early days of the 21st Century, I saw a big museum exhibit of video art the other day. Slowly the cumbersome technology might move out of the way. You’d be able to buy a flat wall-hanging that is a self-contained video unit: the flat screen, the memory, the player, the solar power. A live painting. That’s one of the ways it could go.

  Here in San Jose we’re in the heart of Silicon Valley and it’s all computers, all the time, everywhere. In the airport there’s a billboard from a law firm that wants to help you if your new software gets you sued for patent infringement. There’s onscreen ads before the features in the movie theaters, and more than half of the ads are from companies in the Business, all looking for people to do—what? The job descriptions didn’t even exist when I was growing up. Network administrator, software engineer, digital designer. Moloch wants warm bodies, even when we’re taking time off.

  Slowly it’s getting to be more fun to look at the computer than at TV. You can find whatever you want. It’s almost too easy. A sad thought: imagine a young man who spends all his working hours programming, and then when his sex drive tells him its time to do something else, instead of going out and looking for human companionship he surfs to a porno site and polishes off that end of things with a half-hour clicking frenzy. And then he orders his take-out food delivery from the Web too. An online life. But, dammit, the resolution is so low!

  The most 21st Century thing I’ve seen of late are the new reality TV shows, Survivor and Big Brother. A lot of people prefer Survivor ; the show acquired visibility first, and it’s a little faster-paced. But I’m partial to Big Brother. It’s a purer set-up: there’s no cameramen in with the characters. I don’t find the characters all that likeable or interesting, mind you. But I think the idea of the show is so—21st Century. I even went to the bigbrother2000.com Web-site and looked at the live feeds for awhile. Karen and Brittany were eating lunch and talking about surveillance cameras.

  It’s not too hard to imagine that in just a few years there will be as many different TV channels as there are web-pages now. And a lot of them are going to be non-stop round-the-clock “me-shows” about individual people or groups of people. Usually the people will be participating. But not necessarily. With another notch or two of technology, we’ll have small, robotic “dragonfly” cameras that fly around and spy on things. The unauthorized Pam Anderson channel!

  The 21st Century. It’s just beginning. And now I’m going to dare to eat my 21st Century peach.

  * * *

  Note on “Web Mind”

  Written 1999 and 2000.

  Appeared as four columns in the online Galaxy magazine, 2000.

  This piece started out as the notes for two talks I gave. The first talk was at a Viennese symposium with the unlikely title, “SYNWORLD playwork:hyperspace,” in May, 1999. The other talk was at a colloquium of the San Jose State Philosophy department in October, 1999.

  In the spring of 2000, the editors of Galaxy magazine engaged me to write a regular column for a fledgling online webzine. I wrote four columns under the title “Web Mind,” and I used much of the material from my original Viennese talk. The fact of the essay being based on four columns explains why the second two parts have little thematic connection with the first two.

  Lifebox Immortality

  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!

  In practice, copying a brain would be very hard, for the brain isn’t in digital form. The brain’s 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 early cyberpunk novel Software, I wrote about some robots who specialized in extracting people’s personality software—by eating their brains. When one of my characters hears about the repellent process, “[His] tongue twitched, trying to flick away the imagined taste of the brain tissue, tingly with firing neurons, tart with transmitter chemicals.”

  (In quantum information theory there’s a quite different kind of discussion concerning whether it would be possible to precisely copy any physical system such as a brain. The so-called No-Cloning Theorem indicates that you can’t precisely replicate a system’s quantum state without destroying the system. If you had a quantum-state replicator, you’d need to destroy a brain in order to get a quantum-precise copy of it. This said, it’s quite possible that you could create a behaviorally identical copy of a brain without having to actually copy all of the quantum states involved.)

  In this paper I’m going to talk about a much weaker form of copying a personality. Rather than trying to exactly replicate a brain’s architecture, it might be interesting enough to simply copy all of a person’s memories, preserving the interconnections among them.

  We can view a person’s memory as a hyperlinked database of sensations and facts. The memory is structured something like a website, with words, sounds and images combined into a superblog with trillions of links.