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Living Forever >
Foreword to 'Dark Ages II' (book by Bryan Bergeron)
Permanent link to this article: http://www.kurzweilai.net/meme/frame.html?main=/articles/art0227.html
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Foreword to 'Dark Ages II' (book by Bryan Bergeron)
Our civilization's knowledge legacy is at great risk, growing exponentially with the exploding size of our knowledge bases. And that doesn't count the trillions of bytes of information stored in our brains, which eventually will be captured in the future. How long do we want our lives and thoughts to last?
Originally published September 28, 2001. Published on KurzweilAI.net prior to book publication on July 26, 2001.
My father was one of those people who liked to store all the images and sounds that documented his life. So upon his untimely death at the age of 58 in 1970, I inherited his archives which I treasure to this day. I have my father's 1938 doctoral dissertation at the University of Vienna containing his unique insights into the contributions of Brahms to our musical vocabulary. There are albums of neatly arranged newspaper clippings of his acclaimed musical concerts as a teenager in the hills of Austria. There are the urgent letters to and from the American music patrons who sponsored his flight from Hitler just before "Krystalnacht" made such escape impossible. These items are among dozens of aging boxes containing a myriad of old remembrances, including photographs, musical recordings on vinyl and magnetic tape, personal letters, and even old bills.
I also inherited his penchant for preserving the records of one's life, so along with my father's boxes, I have several hundred boxes of my own. My father's productivity assisted by the technology of his manual typewriter and carbon paper cannot compare with my own prolificacy, aided and abetted by computers and high speed printers which can reproduce my thoughts in all kinds of permutations.
Tucked away in my own boxes are also various forms of digital media: punch cards, paper tape reels, and digital magnetic tapes and disks of various sizes and formats. I often think about just how accessible this information remains. Ironically, the ease of approaching this information is inversely proportional to the level of advancement of the technology used to create it. Most straightforward are the paper documents, which although showing the signs of age, are imminently readable. Only slightly more challenging are the vinyl records and analog sound tape recordings. Although some basic equipment is required, these are not difficult items of equipment to find or use. The punch cards are somewhat more difficult, but it's still possible to find punch card readers, and the formats are uncomplicated.
By far, the most difficult information to retrieve is that contained on the digital disks and tapes. Consider the challenges involved. For each one, I have to figure out exactly which disk or tape drive was used. I then have to recreate the exact hardware configuration from many years ago. Try finding an IBM 1620 circa 1960 or Data General Nova I circa 1973 with exactly the right disk drive and controller, and you'll quickly discover the difficulties involved. Then once you've assembled the requisite old equipment, there's layers of software to deal with: the appropriate operating system, disk information drivers, and application programs. Then just who are you going to call when you run into the inevitable scores of problems inherent in each layer of hardware and software? It's hard enough getting contemporary systems to work, let alone systems for which the help desks were disbanded decades ago. Even the Computer Museum, which used to be located in Boston, has been disbanded, and even when it was in business, most of the old computers on display had stopped functioning many years earlier.
Assuming that you prevail through all of these obstacles, the actual magnetic data on the disks has probably decayed. So even if we assume that the old hardware and software that you assembled are working perfectly, and that you have aging human experts to assist you with perfect recall of long since obsolete equipment, these old computers would still generate mostly error messages.
So is the information gone? The answer is: not entirely. Even though the magnetic spots may no longer be readable by the original equipment, the faded magnetic regions could be enhanced by suitably sensitive equipment using methods that are analogous to the image enhancement often used on images of the pages of old books. So the information is still there, albeit extremely difficult to get at. With enough devotion and historical research one might actually retrieve it. If we had reason to believe that one of these disks contained secrets of enormous value, we would probably succeed in recovering the information. But the mere motivation of nostalgia is unlikely to be sufficient for this formidable task. I will say that I did largely anticipate this problem, so I do have paper print outs of most of these old files. Invariably, that will be how I solve this problem. The bottom line is that accessing information stored in digital form decades (and sometimes even just years) later is extremely difficult if not impossible.
However, keeping all our information on paper is not the answer. Hard copy archives present a different problem. Although I can readily read even a century-old paper manuscript if I'm holding it in my hand, finding a desired document from among thousands of only modestly organized file folders can be a frustrating and time consuming task. It can take an entire afternoon to locate the right folder, not to mention the risk of straining one's back from moving dozens of heavy file boxes from one stack to another. Using the more compact form of hard copy known as microfilm or microfiche may alleviate some of the problems, but the difficulties of locating the right document remain.
So I have had a dream of taking all of these archives, scanning them into a massive personal data base, and then being able to utilize powerful contemporary search and retrieve methods on the hundreds of thousands of scanned and OCR'd (Optical Character Recognized) records. I even have a name for this project: DAISI (Document And Image Storage Invention), and I have been accumulating the ideas for this little venture for many years.
DAISI will involve the rather formidable task of scanning and OCR'ing hundreds of thousands of documents, and patiently cataloguing them into a data base. But the real challenge to my dream of DAISI is the one that Bryan Bergeron articulates so eloquently in this volume, namely how can I possibly select appropriate hardware and software layers that will give me the confidence that my archives will be viable and accessible decades from now?
Of course my own archival desires are a microcosm of the exponentially expanding knowledge base that the human civilization is accumulating. It is this shared species-wide knowledge base that distinguishes us from other animals. Other animals communicate, but they don't accumulate an evolving and growing base of knowledge to pass down to the next generation. Given that we are writing our precious heritage in what Bergeron calls "disappearing ink," our civilization's legacy would appear to be at great risk. The danger appears to be growing exponentially along with the exploding size of our knowledge bases. The problem is further exacerbated by the accelerating speed with which we turn over to new standards in the many layers of hardware and software needed to store information.
Is there an answer to this dilemma? Bergeron's insightful volume articulates the full dimension of the problem as well as a road map to ameliorating its destructive effects. I will summarize my own response to this predicament below, but first we need to consider yet another source of knowledge.
There is another valuable repository of information stored in our own brains. Our memories and skills, although they may appear to be fleeting, do represent information, stored in vast patterns of neurotransmitter concentrations, interneuronal connections, and other salient neural details. I have estimated the size of this very personal data base at thousands of trillions of bytes (per human brain), and we are further along than many people realize in being able to access this data and understand its encoding. We have already "reverse engineered" (i.e., scanned and understood the methods of) several dozen of the hundreds of regions of the brain, including the way in which information is coded and transmitted from one region to another.
I believe it is a conservative scenario to say that within thirty years we will have completed the high resolution scan of the human brain (just as we have completed today the scan of the human genome) and will have detailed mathematical models of the hundreds of information processing organs we call the human brain. Ultimately we will be able to access and understand the thousands of trillions of bytes of information we have tucked away in each of our brains.
This will introduce the possibility of reinstantiating the vast patterns of information stored in our electrochemical neural mechanisms into other substrates (i.e., computational mechanisms) that will be much more capable in terms of speed, capacity, and in the ability to quickly share knowledge. Today, our brains are limited to a mere hundred trillion connections. Later in this century, our minds won't have to stay so small.
Copying our minds to other mediums raises some key philosophical issues, such as "is that really me," or rather someone else who just happens to have mastered all my thoughts and knowledge? Without addressing all of these issues in this foreword, I will mention that the idea of capturing the information and information processes in our brains has raised the specter that we (or at least entities that act very much like we do) could "live forever." But is that really the implication?
For eons, the longevity of our mental software has been inexorably linked to the survival of our biological hardware. Being able to capture and reinstantiate all the details of our information processes would indeed separate these two aspects of our mortality. But the profound implication of Bergeron's Dark Ages II is that software does not necessarily live forever. Indeed there are formidable challenges to it living very long at all.
So whether information represents one man's sentimental archive, or the accumulating knowledge base of the human-machine civilization, or the mind files stored in our brains, what can we say is the ultimate resolution regarding the longevity of software? The answer is simply this: information lasts only so long as someone cares about it. The conclusion that I've come to with regard to my DAISI project, after several decades of careful consideration, is that there is no set of hardware and software standards existing today, nor any likely to come along, that will provide me with any reasonable level of confidence that the stored information will still be accessible (without unreasonable levels of effort) decades from now. The only way that my archive (or any one else's) can remain viable is if it is continually upgraded and ported to the latest hardware and software standards. If an archive remains ignored, it will ultimately become as inaccessible as my old 8 inch disk platters.
In this pioneering work, Bergeron describes the full dimensions of this fundamental issue, and also provides a compelling set of recommendations to preserve key sources of information beyond the often short-sighted goals underlying the design of most contemporary information processing systems. The bottom line will remain that information will continue to require continual maintenance and support to remain "alive." Whether data or wisdom, information will only survive if we want it to.
We are continually recreating our civilization's trove of knowledge. It does not simply survive by itself. We are constantly rediscovering, reinterpreting, and reformatting the legacy of culture and technology that our forbears have bestowed to us. We will eventually be able to actually access the vast patterns of information in our brains, which will provide the opportunity to back up our memories and skills. But all of this information will be fleeting if no one cares about it. Translating our currently hardwired thoughts into software will not necessarily provide us with immortality. It will simply put the means to determine how long we want our lives and thoughts to last into our own figurative hands.
Dark Ages II
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Mind·X Discussion About This Article:
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Re: Controlling neuron scanning
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>I'd be interested to see if you disagree with this minimal capability.
I agree that there is a minimal capability to stimulate a section of the brain. The 'finding' part is what throws me. Say there are 10 million discrete sections you could address. Enumerating them, you are then facing the question of what qualities you should (or could) index. Cluster 9,832,621,987 is' zap 'whoa, Grandma's posies wafting in a balmy summer breeze in the sunshine! So, cross-reference posies and summer and Grandma. And breezes and sunshine. Highlight posies as exemplar. Next section' This may take some time, but the process must occur BEFORE you can query, 'recall posy exemplar.' Recording a brain wave that follows a zap just falls back to same old problem. How do you know what that wave means in the first place?
What's interesting is that our memories are so rich, their meaning requires coordination with other sensory cortices. Maybe all memories need some kind of modality on which to paint meaning. It doesn't have to be linguistic until we want to talk about them. It just needs some kind of player, if you will.
So severing the connections to these modalities precludes the facility to register what the memories at a given spot MEAN. Isolation destroys its relevance.
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Re: Finding the neuron sets first
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Of course, this works for existing memories. You already retrieved them and you are now committing them to computer memory. That's OK to do. It's rather redundant, unless you know you will forget it and have trouble retrieving it. But then you put all that energy into storing it elsewhere, so the act increases the likelihood you can retrieve it with ease much later. You made it "useful".
The real utility comes in reading something new that you HAVEN'T memorized. But there the problem is the memory location isn't assigned yet (it hasn't grown in the brain). So you can't store its future location in the computer. In 72 hours, the data has cycled up and down you spinal chord, waiting to be integrated into some new synapses. (If not used much, it dies the entropic death of a college test cramming.) THEN you can find out where it finally landed, if you can remember you needed to record its location. Then you can ask the computer what was stored without a brain address. It will jog your memory, activate the new-grown neuron, yielding up its address. By then you'll have no trouble recalling the trivia anytime you want it. Nor will it be trouble retrieving it from computer memory. Both will be copies of each other, redundant.
Does all this seem worthwhile? |
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Re: Scanning one's subconscious
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The way the Scientologists seek out old memories is similar to this, but non-invasive.
They use an instrument called an electrometer (known as an "e-meter"), which is basically a whetstone bridge. A person holds two electrodes connected to the e-meter and a tiny battery-driven current is sent from the meter to one of the electrodes. The current passes out the electrode and through the hand, arm and body and back the same way to the meter, completing the circuit. As a person thinks about different thoughts (known as "mental image pictures"), the electrical resistance in the body changes minutely. These changes are amplified and cause the needle on the e-meter to dance in various patterns (similar to the needle dance of an audio VU meter in a tape recorder). Every pattern has an exact meaning and is associated with a specific type of thought or "hole" on one's memory. The professional Scientologists spend hundreds of hours doing courses and internships to learn how to recognize, or "read," each of these patterns.
The person on the electrometer, who is being counseled (known as a "PC"), is asked a series of questions relating to some past incident in their life. As the PC tries to remember past memories, the Scientology practitioner (known as the "Auditor") "steers" their attention to different memories in accordance with how the e-meter reads. By asking certain exact questions at specific times, the e-meter reads in certain recognizable patterns, hence the Auditor is able to revive completely lost, or half-forgotten, memories in the PC, "repressed" memories the PC probably never would have recalled otherwise. Thus the e-meter is a kind of guide, NOT any sort of "lie detector" as some have misunderstood it to be. And the e-meter actually DOES nothing to the PC, it just guides the Auditor's questions.
The whole process is very interesting and is obviously built on Freud (and many other's work), but taken to a technological level because of the use of the electrometer AND, probably more importantly, because of the extensive system of recursive questions (known as "the tech") Hubbard (the founder of Scientology) worked out over the course of many decades and thousands of trial and error auditing sessions with early (volunteer) PCs. More specifically, with this e-meter and tech, the Auditor guides the PC in a search through his or her mind for lost memories, mostly of painful incidents (known as "engrams"). Thus, application of the tech, is sort of like jogging a person's memory who has lost their keys. First you might ask them: Did you leave them in the car? Then: Did you drop them on the path to the house? Did you leave them on the counter by the door? Did you take them upstairs? Sooner or later the person may perk up and say: That's it, I left them in the bathroom -- upstairs! The whole process of Scientology auditing -- though a very sophisticated system of questioning -- is actually based upon some very simple, if not elegant principles, most of which I cannot go into here.
I know Scientology is a controversial subject some places in the world (at least the administrative structure is controversial). My purpose here is not to get into any of these politics, but to simply describe a little about the technique of Scientology auditing which I see as a sort of data-mining process: A human computer (the Auditor's mind) data-mines another human computer (the PC's mind), guided by an electronic meter AND a system of questions arranged in a recursive algorithm. This methodology is applied for the purpose of discovering, for the PC, certain engrams that, when reviewed and brought out of the unconscious mind (known as the "reactive mind" in Scientology), give great empirically relief. But then so does your local bartender, only he can take forever and, unlike Scientology, gives no guarantee one will not be back for more.
James Jaeger
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Re: Scanning one's subconscious
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The way the Scientologists seek out old memories is similar to this, but non-invasive.
They use an instrument called an electrometer (known as an "e-meter"), which is basically a whetstone bridge. A person holds two electrodes connected to the e-meter and a tiny battery-driven current is sent from the meter to one of the electrodes. The current passes out the electrode and through the hand, arm and body and back the same way to the meter, completing the circuit. As a person thinks about different thoughts (known as "mental image pictures"), the electrical resistance in the body changes minutely. These changes are amplified and cause the needle on the e-meter to dance in various patterns (similar to the needle dance of an audio VU meter in a tape recorder). Every pattern has an exact meaning and is associated with a specific type of thought or "hole" on one's memory. The professional Scientologists spend hundreds of hours doing courses and internships to learn how to recognize, or "read," each of these patterns.
The person on the electrometer, who is being counseled (known as a "PC"), is asked a series of questions relating to some past incident in their life. As the PC tries to remember past memories, the Scientology practitioner (known as the "Auditor") "steers" their attention to different memories in accordance with how the e-meter reads. By asking certain exact questions at specific times, the e-meter reads in certain recognizable patterns, hence the Auditor is able to revive completely lost, or half-forgotten, memories in the PC, "repressed" memories the PC probably never would have recalled otherwise. Thus the e-meter is a kind of guide, NOT any sort of "lie detector" as some have misunderstood it to be. And the e-meter actually DOES nothing to the PC, it just guides the Auditor's questions.
The whole process is very interesting and is obviously built on Freud (and many other's work), but taken to a technological level because of the use of the electrometer AND, probably more importantly, because of the extensive system of recursive questions (known as "the tech") Hubbard (the founder of Scientology) worked out over the course of many decades and thousands of trial and error auditing sessions with early (volunteer) PCs. More specifically, with this e-meter and tech, the Auditor guides the PC in a search through his or her mind for lost memories, mostly of painful incidents (known as "engrams"). Thus, application of the tech, is sort of like jogging a person's memory who has lost their keys. First you might ask them: Did you leave them in the car? Then: Did you drop them on the path to the house? Did you leave them on the counter by the door? Did you take them upstairs? Sooner or later the person may perk up and say: That's it, I left them in the bathroom -- upstairs! The whole process of Scientology auditing -- though a very sophisticated system of questioning -- is actually based upon some very simple, if not elegant principles, most of which I cannot go into here.
I know Scientology is a controversial subject some places in the world (at least the administrative structure is controversial). My purpose here is not to get into any of these politics, but to simply describe a little about the technique of Scientology auditing which I see as a sort of data-mining process: A human computer (the Auditor's mind) data-mines another human computer (the PC's mind), guided by an electronic meter AND a system of questions arranged in a recursive algorithm. This methodology is applied for the purpose of discovering, for the PC, certain engrams that, when reviewed and brought out of the unconscious mind (known as the "reactive mind" in Scientology), give great empirical relief. But then so does your local bartender, only he can take forever and, unlike Scientology, gives no guarantee one will not be back for more.
James Jaeger
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Re: Mesmerism
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>An "e-meter", a swinging pocketwatch, a crucifix, a Tarot deck, and a psychoanalyst's couch, even a shrunken head: they all do the same thing.
Not at all.
>They are psychological catalysts for the more important cooperation transpiring between the two people.
Have you ever been on an e-meter?
>It is not to belittle the process which is real, and productive, even healing.
To each their own tool (or religion, or methodology). And many pharmaceutical drugs are extremely useful and their developers should be applauded.
>Just understand it has everything to do with the skill and willingness of the participants, and little to do with the trappings.
You are correct that the auditing process requires a willing participant, but anyone who has been skillfully trained to read an e-meter can easily tell if someone is lying or telling the truth whether they want to have such revealed or not. This may be one of the reasons Scientology is so controversial: because the technology actually works. More ominous is the fact that, to a greater or lesser degree, this technology makes many of the pharmaceutical drugs obsolete and thus, to some degree, takes market share from the drug and psychiatric industries. As you may be aware, most of the major medical colleges were funded early on by the Rockefeller Foundations. Rockefeller founded the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey which was a cartel partner with the giant German chemical conglomerate, I.G. Farben (the outfit that set up the Nazi concentration camps). These cartel entities, directly or indirectly, established, or influenced, almost every aspect of the chemical/pharmaceutical industry possible. And, to this end, Rockefeller money was never "donated" to a medical college without seeing to it that each new crop of physicians failed to write plentiful prescriptions for pharmaceuticals as an ongoing practice, especially for "mental illness." To see the ownership, method of indoctrination and extent of influence the Rockefeller Group has had, and how much of the Farben ownership and directorates were obfuscated after the Second World War, check out a book called WORLD WITHOUT CANCER, available at Barns & Noble or Amazon.com. Some of the guff Scientology has been getting the past 50 years may make more sense to you. Again, I am not an apologist for either side. I am just trying to take a balanced view, since I have some familiarity with both Scientology and Psychiatry.
James Jaeger
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We need a Dark Age about now anyway
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We need a Dark Age about now. They are required any time that physical sciences and technologies outstrip social sciences, ethics, and politics.
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A mass invasion by barbarians who wipe out all the tapes and make it impossible to verify or trust scientific data would be useful. Making certain types of scientists, such as AI researchers, so terrified to communicate about their work that they don't, would also slow the march of dangerous technologies down a great deal.
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All of these things would definitely be good. I agree with the Unabomber, Steven Speilberg, Bill Joy, etc., and I think Ray Kurzweil, Ralph Merkle, Hans Moravec, etc., are dangerous lunatics. |
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Let It Rot?
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>Given that we are writing our precious heritage in what Bergeron calls "disappearing ink," our civilization's legacy would appear to be at great risk.
Every time you upgrade your computer's OS to a newer version, do you keep the old version running? Why not? Because you want to MOVE ON.
By the same token, is it really so bad that our civilization's legacy is disappearing? And is it really our "legacy" that is disappearing -- seems like it's just a bunch of old ways and old records of same that are disappearing.
Why is it important for civilization to remember everything? Freud said we should erase our unconscious mind of all the old bad stuff. Why should collective history be considered any different? What, so we won't forget all the horrible things we have done and experienced? Are a bunch of old rotting newspapers, photographs or digital files going to keep us from another holocaust? If this is all we have to prevent such from happening again, excuse me if I'm not too enthusiastic. I would rather see modern mental health techniques help people become more ethical because there are greater advantages to being more ethical -- not become more ethical because we never want to repeat the holocaust. Doing this is resisting the past, and we all know, deep down that we get anything we resist. The universe gives you what you DON'T want and withholds what you DO want. No?
So it seems to me that each new generation of software, computer, automobile, airplane, sky scraper, city, world and human already embodies all of the former generations of trial, error and work by its very nature. We should appreciate THIS as the legacy, not some past pile of papers, disks and photos. The sun also shines today.
And seems to me that keeping the past around too much and hanging onto the old records, the old files and the old newspapers is actually detrimental, because it inhibits "new starts" with excessive fear. If children had all of the memories of their fathers when they started out, I bet not one thing new would get invented, nor would one new land (or planet) be explored. With the same old baggage hanging around civilization's neck, is it any surprise that advancement is as slow as it is? So maybe every book, periodical, microfiche, bank record, video tape, hard drive, computer disk, film and photograph created prior to 1990 should be destroyed?
Thank god people get to die -- and possibly get to go somewhere else, like maybe heaven or maybe right back to earth. Wouldn't that be ironic, if it were true? If people didn't get to live new lives without having the old life whipped out, I don't see any way they could improve, or even be ALLOWED to improve. I don't see any way that could take what they learned in a previous life and apply it to a new life with everyone harping on them, even their own conscious, of what a rat that were/are. Now I'm not saying that I know whether past and future lives ARE real, I'm just speculating about the validity of keeping old records around, old records including memories or past lives, if any. So IF past and future lives ARE true, "death" serves quite a "rebirth" function. If true, maybe collective civilization should learn something from individual's deaths and allow the past, and all its negative heritage, to die as well. Maybe it's good that we can't dredge up any of the old computer files with ease. Maybe it's good that TRW and Trans Union can't dredge up all your old credit records to remind you that you're a credit-profligate -- even after you've turned over a new leaf or become employed, finally.
Seems to me that memory of the past is more of a dossier chain and ball than it is anything else -- especially, given the past we all have, collectively and severally.
So I say, if no one has taken the book, the data, the idea, the floppy disk or the blueprint and integrated it into the newest, latest and greatest -- let it rot: maybe it is meant to! It may free you up to do new things, explore new vistas, forget old enemies, take new chances, live new civilizations.
James Jaeger
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