I decided to go out on my own just as the PC revolution was about to take place. I moved to California to work for a little startup called Apple. They liked my funky diverse background. It was all new, and nobody had a PhD in this stuff. I was certainly as qualified as anybody else. I grew with the company, made good money and dated occasionally. Life was good. When Steve Jobs left, the first time, and the company became way too corporate and stupid, I went out on my own as a consultant and then a web developer when the Internet changed the world.
That’s all mostly good stuff. The difficulty for me was that at every change or transition in my life, depression would kick in. I just felt sad and hopeless when this happened. I’d have no energy. I tried my best to fake a good attitude, but the people close to me could always see through the charade. I tried anti-depressants for a while, which seemed to take the negative edge off. The negative side effect from that was not facing reality and making some poor relationship and financial decisions.
So, I stopped the drugs and tried to focus on great moments. In my sea of sadness, if something good happened, I’d seize on it and magnify it. Like the birth of our son, Evan. I’d be the one to get up with him at 2:00 AM since I couldn’t sleep anyway. I’d rock him in my arms to calm him, and his warm and positive energy would flow into me. I think at less than a year old, he saved my life. I fought back and eventually crawled out of the psychic holes I’d fallen into.
But all this doesn’t answer the big “Who am ‘I’” question. Remember those philosophy classes? Who am “I” is a big question. Is it our brain, our soul, our body? What is it? Little did I know that when I met Frank at the university, it might ultimately lead to a possible answer to that big question.
CHAPTER 4
WHO’D A THOUGHT?
Back to the Coffee House at BU. How do I start? “Frank, I know this may seem a bit ‘out there,’ but here’s the idea. Has Bart told you about what we do—InTheEventOfMyDeath.info?”
“Sure. Kind of a living epitaph site. I was thinking about that and have a question. How do you keep people from posting ‘dead fish’ to the site?” Now that was an interesting, if not tangential, question. The “Dead Fish” refers to a 100 year old practice of sending a smelly dead fish wrapped in newspapers (archaic media form) to your enemies just to let them know how you feel about them. His question was a clever reference to how would we keep our site from allowing enemies of the dead to besmirch them online. This turned out to be more of a prescient question than any of us could have expected at that moment.
I smiled. “There is a moderator option that allows the owner of the site to view any posts before they happen. After all, who would want spam on a memorial website?”
“Good point. Sorry I interrupted. Please continue.”
“Well, we took a big leap and said, ‘Would it be possible to combine what we’re doing and what you’re doing? The result being not just a website that acts as a digital scrapbook, like it does now, but as a virtual life. A site where the deceased could live ‘virtually’ forever. Where she or he could interact with their loved ones, read eBooks and even play poker online?’” I paused just to let the idea sink in and gauge Frank’s reaction.
His face actually seemed to change colors. First it went to red, then blue, then ghostly white and then back to normal. I had never seen anyone have such a visceral reaction to anything anyone ever said before. “Oh…my…God…” He drifted off for a minute into deep thought.
We waited. Finally, I just couldn’t stand the silence. “What is it?”
“Just give me a minute. My mind is racing. I literally have to catch my breath and calm down. Just calm down…n…n.” He almost seemed to be talking to himself. Pulling himself together. I could tell we had struck a chord or a nerve in a big way. I just couldn’t tell which.
He finally seemed to level off and started. “You would have no way of knowing this, but your idea is something I have thought about a lot. Not how we could do this, but if we should do this. The unintended consequences could be huge. I know the nuclear scientists on the Manhattan Project in the 1940s had the same discussion before unleashing their new technology on the world. They had a big incentive to stop a genocidal foe. But look what they unleashed in terms of nuclear proliferation. Once the genie is out of the bottle, so to speak, you can’t put it back.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “Are you saying you have the genie?” I said cautiously.
Now Frank didn’t hesitate. “Yesss,” he said in the voice that sounded like the hiss of a snake. No, more like air escaping from a bottle.
He continued. “I have not told anyone this and I’m not sure why I’m telling you now. Maybe it’s because Bart is a good friend, and maybe it’s because we have somehow connected or even synchronized on this idea. Not only do I think I may have the genie, but I also have the bottle.”
Now I had to gather my thoughts and emotions. I began. “So what’s the problem? Why not expose your genius, I mean genie, to the world?”
Suddenly Frank seemed distracted again. He checked his watch. “I have a class shortly and the answer to your question will take more than coffee. Let’s just say I am interested in your idea. Can you meet me for dinner tonight—just you? Nine o’clock, my house?”
Bart and Loretta looked at each other, both puzzled and uncomfortable. I broke the spell. “Why me alone? Bart and Loretta are both family and business partners. Bart is your friend.”
Frank was quick to answer but looked over both shoulders before he started. “I think it’s safer if you come alone. My work is so sensitive I think I am being watched. Three of you would attract attention. If you come alone, it will seem more casual. Don’t worry, you can share what we discuss with Bart and Loretta, but only after you have taken certain precautions.” That sounded very cloak-and-dagger. I almost laughed, but I’m glad I didn’t.
Bart and Loretta looked at each other and nodded slightly. I said, “OK, I’ll be there.”
CHAPTER 5
MAYBE NOT SUCH A GOOD IDEA
That night, I drove up Frank’s long, tree-lined driveway and parked in front of a rambling old colonial mansion. My first thought was, if I had known being a professor paid so well . . .
Before I could knock, Frank opened the door and whispered in a conspiratorial tone, “Come in.” The vestibule was dark and we walked down a long hallway. The walls were lined with vintage black-and-white photographs, some of which I recognized. Steichen, Kertesz, Brandt and maybe Siskind. We arrived at a back door and stepped out onto a flagstone patio overlooking a serene pond with a storybook willow tree hanging over it. Fallen red and orange leaves drifted over the water’s surface.
“Nice digs,” I said in my usual classy way. “Do you collect photography?”
“Yes. Those are signed original silver gelatin prints. I’ve always been fascinated by the genius ability of these photographers to tell a complex story in a single two-dimensional frame. Frozen in time, as it were, but full of implications and subtleties.”
Frank turned a valve that protruded from the rear stone wall of the house, which started a faux waterfall. Water began to run down the wall into a trough. It made a soothing, whishing sound.
“This sound will mask our conversation,“ he said. “You probably think I’m paranoid, but it’s justified.”
That’s always been an interesting paradox to me. How do you know whether somebody making that statement is telling the truth or is truly delusional? I guessed I’d find out. “As Andy Grove, the famous corporate philosopher said, ‘Only the paranoid survive.’”
“Truer words…” He trailed off into his own thoughts. Then he seemed to rouse from his daydream. “We’ve got a very big problem on our hands. If I was more of a half-glass-full kind of guy, I’d use the word ‘challenge’ instead of ‘problem,’ but I’m a scientist who solves problems and a realist who is scared by them.”
Silence, then, “Speaking of half-full glasses, can I get you something to
drink?”
This time I was going to be patient. I knew Frank would get around to telling me the story, but he had to do it in his own way. Not only his words, but his body language betrayed his struggle.
“Diet Coke, if you have it.”
“Sure. But I’m going to need something stronger,” he said, moving behind a rattan bar on the patio. He returned with my drink in a glass with ice and his glass full of an amber liquid—no ice.
Maybe a little humor would ease his mind. “Your glass half-full comment reminded me of a funny cartoon I once saw. Three men are looking at the half-filled glass. One asks, ‘What do you see?’ The first says, ‘I see a glass half-full.’ The second says, ‘I see a glass half-empty.’ The third hesitates and says, ‘Why isn’t that glass on a coaster?’”
Frank smiled. “Just goes to show that there are always more than two ways to look at something. Listen, you’re probably wondering why I am acting so strangely. Let’s just say the implications of what we’re working on are much bigger than you even suspected. Besides the technical considerations, there are multiple ethical issues that make arguments over cloning and stem cell research seem trivial.”
I’d thought of a couple, but I said, “Like what?”
“Let me just rattle off a few. Who would get the privilege of being digitally or virtually immortal? Who decides? How much does it cost? What if a DigiPerson becomes sick mentally and becomes destructive? Who are the police, judge and jury? What about viruses?”
My head was already spinning and all I could muster was, “Oh…I had not thought about those things.”
He continued. “Another thing. Would the person be completely digital or would she at least retain the sense of a physical self?”
He seemed to be gathering steam. “Here’s my ‘favorite.’ What if somebody creates multiple instances of themselves? How do they coexist? What kind of problems would multiple ‘yous’ cause? We know twins or even clones aren’t exact matches and diverge immediately from being real copies of their counterparts the minute they are born. But the kind of copies we are talking about are exact. I think these and many more problems need to be solved before we let the genie out, or it could literally destroy the world as we know it.”
He took a breath. “I’m not sure who’s competent to solve these problems, who doesn’t have a special interest. If you tell the government, i.e. my bosses, they’ll think about how to make a weapon out of it. If you tell the university, who knows what they’ll do. From a business perspective, it’s worth billions. Now you know why I have been acting strangely.”
He stopped and I took it as my cue to jump in. “I don’t think you can bury this. Just like the atomic bomb or the DNA double helix, there were multiple countries and scientists working it. If we didn’t come up with it, somebody else would have. So I think we have a duty to get it out there in the safest way possible. Just like Oppenheimer wrestled with the ethical issues in a moral way; maybe the scientists are the best ones to mediate the use of their inventions.”
“I’m not sure we’re equipped. We have our heads buried in research, numbers and formulas not human interaction and morality,” he said.
We sat quietly for what seemed like half an hour. Finally, I said, “What if you and I do this together? We apply for all the patents it would take to protect it. Then we lay out all the rules of use. I think you and I, maybe with help from Bart and Loretta, could do it. If we don’t, we risk some self-interested bastard doing who-knows-what to the fabric of our society with this new invention/weapon.”
I watched him roll this idea around, and then he said, “We’d need a very good lawyer.”
“We’d probably need a team of very good lawyers, bodyguards and capital to pull this off,” I said.
“I don’t know. I know zero about that stuff, and I don’t know if I’m up for the battle. I’m fifty-five you know,” he replied.
“I have the contacts for all three of those things, and I am up for it. It’s the battle of a lifetime. Heck it’s the battle of the millennium. I will fight, but I need you to protect and continue to grow the science.”
He smiled and held his index finger to his chin. I think he was getting excited. “I will do this under one condition.”
“What’s that?”
“I need to know we have the same core values. I don’t want to exploit the invention for personal gain. I mean, I have no problem making some money—maybe even getting rich, but I’m more concerned that this be first and foremost a benefit to humankind.”
“That is exactly how I feel about it.” I think I meant it at the time.
As I drove away from Frank’s house, I had a vivid daydream. I had this image of myself as a little boy in shorts and sandals. An older man was holding my hand. We were walking on the beach, and I could smell the salt air and hear the waves crashing. I sensed that the man was my father whom I never got a chance to know. I looked up and the man was Frank.
CHAPTER 6
THE IMAGE IN THE MIRROR
I’m going to skip some of the details and get right to it. Frank and I formed a company called Digital3000. We got the money, the lawyers and applied for the patents. We had to fight off DARPA, but we got it done.
It only took about six months. Fall became spring. That’s not to say it was easy. If you’ve ever started a business, you know all the hassles that come with it. Sometimes I felt like we were juggling live hand grenades that were going to go off any minute. We had the added problem of security, both for ourselves and our intellectual property. We hired full time security at the office and had our homes, cars and offices swept daily for surveillance devices. As for the secret sauce, we did apply for patents. But we just put enough in them to cover us, hopefully, without giving away the store. Our patents are still pending, but sometimes those things take years to perfect.
Maybe the biggest challenge was putting together a team of engineers to work with Frank and Bart to bring the Digital Mind to market. Then too, we needed business and marketing pros to work with me. Talent, vision and an ability to work very long hours were a requirement. How do you do the work and still protect the IP (“Intellectual Property”)? I had a former client who was afraid of losing his secret work to his engineers in Manila so that he only kept one copy of his work. Unfortunately, he kept it in the World Trade Center just before 9/11. Six months work by 600 hundred engineers was lost. True story.
Well, that’s all dull operational stuff. The interesting part really started when we got the first versions of our virtual minds online for testing. Pretty strange talking to yourself across the virtual divide. Who’s in charge? Who’s the real you? This actually became the first grenade to blow. Loretta became so engaged with her digital alter ego that she stayed up all night deep in conversation. I found her the next morning red-eyed in front of her screen. The digital Loretta seemed to have taken over or she had become somehow addicted. It reminded me of the rudimentary Eliza program from the last century that acted like a Rogerian psychologist. It just asked open ended, leading questions like, “How do you feel about that” and “go on…” peppered with nouns you had previously used. The result was that it seemed to take on a human-like quality that sucked many people into hours of “conversation.” Maybe Siri and Alexa do that now.
“Loretta. Loretta!”
“Wha…what?”
“C’mon. Get up. Let’s go.” I physically lifted her by the arm and pulled her over to the couch where she promptly fell sideways and off to sleep.
A few hours later, I stopped back at her office and gently shook her. “How are you?”
“What happened?” she said groggily.
“You got lost.” Because I knew I was being cryptic, I continued. “You got so absorbed with your online Loretta, you lost track of everything and I mean ‘everything.’”
“Wow. That’s scary.”
“It sure is. That’s why Bart, Frank and I have come to a decision.”
“What’s that?” she said wi
th a quizzical look.
“We’re blocking any of us from engaging our own online personas. You can talk to virtual Bart, Frank or me, but not yourself. The same goes for the rest of us and our digital selves.”
“How do you do that? I mean I understand, but how do you control it?”
“Well, based on your login, we know who you are and have programmed in a block against speaking with your digital self. We have done the same for each of us. It’s just too dangerous.”
We sat quietly for a few minutes letting all of this sink in. Finally, Loretta said what I had been thinking, “I wonder what other surprises like this we will find?”
CHAPTER 7
EARTH TO LISA
We did a few months of testing and we encountered several other psycho-digital problems along the way. Similar to the ban we had on connecting to our own digital selves, we had to program a strict rule against allowing multiple digital instances of the same person to exist. A good analogy for the problem is that letting multiples exist is like connecting the wrong cables to jump a car battery. If you connect the wrong positive and negative terminals, the battery can actually explode. I learned this the hard way when I tried to help out my girlfriend’s roommate in college. It was an old car and the battery acid actually shot out of the battery when I connected the cables the wrong way.
Anyway, we found when two instances of the same digital persona met online, it created a kind of meltdown that permanently damaged both. It just isn’t meant to be. Frank and Bart had several theories on why this occurs, but they were too technical for me. To some extent, it’s as if we were playing God, but we just weren’t smart enough to pull it off. I don’t know if God ever made mistakes creating stuff, but I know we sure did. New technologies always lead to unintended consequences. Just look at nuclear fission and gene sequencing as examples. Creating a Digital Mind-verse would be no exception.
Not So Dead Page 2