| dc.description.abstract | A paper in two parts. After a brief introduction from an art historian from the far future, a contemporary (2009) author discusses a near-future exosomatic technology called the lifebox. Unlike the dreams of the “hard” AI project, the idea of the lifebox is not that it will replicate a brain’s architecture, but that it will copy a person’s memories, preserving the interconnections among them. In this coming technology, a person’s memory is viewed as a hyperlinked database of sensations and facts. Memory therefore is structured something like a website, with words, sounds and images combined into a kind of superblog with trillions of links. The lifebox uses hypertextual links to hook together everything one tells it. One’s eventual audience will be able to interact with one’s stories, interrupting and asking questions. The lifebox will be like a simulation of your self. The reason another person can plausibly expect to emulate another self is that, (a) people are universal computers and (b), people are exquisitely tuned to absorbing inputs in the form of anecdotes and memories. Memories and links can act as a special kind of software that needs to be run on a very specialized kind of hardware: another human being. Essentially one’s memories and links are an emulation code. The effect of the lifebox will be to make immortality accessible to a wide range of people. The second part of the paper is in the form of a response to the first part by an art historian from the far future, a time when lifeboxes are ubiquitous. The historian outlines the ideo-technological background to contemporary trends set in motion by the lifebox. | |
