Virtual Thought

AAAAAAAUUUUUUUGGGGGHHH!

Every once in a while I find I have too much e-mail that is unread, piling up in Thunderbird… so I run through and look at the stuff that I’ve been ignoring. I ‘m glad I caught this stuff from one of the mailing lists that I subscribe to:

It seems that there are a couple of websites that let one share one’s unused GMail invites: GMail-o-matic and GMail Swap. I’m sure there are many, many others. But, continuing in the thread of the mailing list, I came across two more interesting items…

One, is a pretty cool little utility that allows one to use one’s GMail account as a filesystem for Linux. Considering how many invites I have (after I donated a couple to the sites above), I could have a remote 5 gigabyte file system (that probably is dog slow) using the rest of them if I sent the rest of the invites to myself. This application of GMail is just fantastic: not at all what Google intended, bless their hearts, and just a neat hack all around. Makes me want to run a Linux emulator on my Windows XP box just so I can have a GMail filesystem. Great hack. Totally.

Next in the thread came the GMail Is Too Creepy people, who posit that the GMail privacy issues are too great and too numerous to warrant getting a GMail account or even receiving an e-mail from someone with a GMail account. After reading through their site, they are totally right. I’m a privacy advocate, especially in the digital age where the amazing fluidity of digital data gives potential ne’er-do-wells a wealth of evil opportunities to exploit a hapless ‘Net public… on the other hand, there’s no sense in becoming a card-carrying member of the Culture of Fear and purposefully forcing my mind to settle on such dreadful prospects as Evil Corporations Out To Get Us. That, and this stupid little essay made me immediately hostile towards their purpose.

Guess what, guys? I use GMail just like I used to use my HotMail account: for incidental mail, for giving to people who I want to communicate with but don’t really care about, for services that I don’t want to spam my personal account… I absolutely care about privacy, I don’t necessarily adore evil corporations, I do care about the privacy of those I respond to… oh, and about item #3: since I happen to be one of those teenagers that went to college and majored in computer science and oh, guess what, happen to know something about history. Don’t be a jerk; people will find your causes more appealing.

To go back to how I agree with the aforementioned site, however, check out this URL for why governments like GMail for spying purposes.

I know an urban legend about Batman.

I won’t tell it here, however… you have to ask me personally, for the magic is both in the story and the looks of wide-eyed wonder that greet any repetition of this fantastic and uplifting tale. A harrowing tale of adventure and loss, the Batman Urban Legend is a thing of rare beauty and power.

Recent Batman sightings reminded me of this Urban Legend. Where is Pat and how’s he doing, anyway?

A while back (and I keep meaning to talk about it), I finished the excellent book The Age of Spiritual Machines by Ray Kurzweil, an excellent book that I would recommend to anyone.

I have only two problems with the book: the first is that Kurzweil sets up an ontology I disagree with by stating that human intelligence is the apex of natural evolution. Because human intelligence is more intelligent than the natural process that evolved it, he continues, it is only logical to assume that the silicate intelligences that we create will be smarter than us. Since I try not to think hierarchically and I fundamentally disagree with both the notions that evolution has an apex and that human intelligence is something to be valued above almost all other things, I cannot subscribe to this notion.

The second is that he says a machine intelligence realized with a silicate neural structure (neural networks, et. al.) will necessarily be smarter than humans because their neurons will be able to fire a few orders of magnitude faster. Biological neurons can fire, at most, about 300 times per second while silicate neurons could fire many millions of times per second. To quote one of my favorite books, Wyrm by Mark Fabi, by how many times would one have to speed up a dog’s brain until it was smarter than a human? 100 times? 1,000,000 times? A dog that could think a million times faster than a normal dog would merely take 1/1,000,000th the time to decide whether it wanted to sniff your crotch or not.

All in all, though, the book is fantabulous. It touches upon artificial intelligence, human and post-human extensions through technology, nanotechnology, bio-engineering… along with some good ol’ fashioned futurist predictions.

One of which I agree with: we are the last generation to know death.

Given that, according to Moore’s Law, we will have a computer in 2020 that has the computational abilities of the human brain and it will cost $1,000, I think it’s safe to say that we will, at least, be able to non-intrusively scan our neural architecture into a computer and be able to simulate the execution of that architecture within a computer. Yes, I mean downloading our personalities into a computer.

What we should begin asking ourselves now, besides, “Where did I put all those existential philosophy books from Philosophy 101?”, is how these people (for they will be people) will relate to us, and how we to them. What will it be like to be sentient in a machine? What will they be able to sense? What senses will they, indeed, grant themselves? What will our reactions be and how can we start improving them now?

So, congrats, we’re probably going to be immortal. Now if we could just figure out that pesky angst thing, we’d be set for post-life.