I posted another of my “Philosophy and Computers” lectures, this one is about the first part of Chapter 3 of my Lifebox book. I talk about self-reproduction, morphogenesis, and ecology in terms of computations.

I’m trying various MP3 compression settings, and so far I’m always ending up with about 1 Meg per minute, whether its mono or stereo, 128 kbps or 64 kbps, VBR off or on. One student suggested that if I ran it through a low-pass filter to remove high frequencies (hiss), I’d get smaller files. In any case, the sound is decent now, thanks to my clip-on microphone. I have quite a bit of computer demos in this lecture, by the way, so if you want to study it, you might want to get hold of CAPOW. You can download the new build of CAPOW by using the Download Software button on the Lifebox page.

I was out at Four Mile Beach on Route 1 four miles north of Santa Cruz earlier this week. The wild beaches of California are always even better than I remembered.

Every time it blows me away.

Escape from the machines.

But computation is everywhere. The paths of the birds.

I sat for awhile in this nice cove. Note the fog bank twenty meters offshore.

Now and then a wave would sweep up and a sheet of water would move around a rock and back into the ocean. After a few meters of motion, the edge of the sheet always develops a scalloped edge.

The scallops are always the same, yet always different. These pictures are of two different sheets of water. Unpredictable computations dancing on a strange attractor in phase space. Me too.

I need some help with a question for an SF story I want to write. [Illos today are golden oldies from the blog; my stash of images is becoming a kind of visual Tarot.]

So suppose we have a superintelligent web of tiny machines with an enormous net RAM and flop, with tons of data, and with smart agents living inside it. The Web, in other words, but more so. And now suppose that we plug into it and get smarter. How will this feel?

But, wait, let me evade the hard question for a second. Plug in how? I could use my usual “uvvy,” a soft plastic computer you wear on the base of your neck and it reaches into your brain with magnetic vortices. You can take it off, which is important, as no reasonable person wants to be permanently plugged in.

Or some nanomachines called “arphids” get into your hair like lice and can diddle your brainwaves. A different kind of uvvy. But maybe people are initially leery of the uvvy and the arphids.

They could get by with what I call “stunglasses,” glasses with a heads-up display overlaid. These could even be contact lenses. And you could have tiny sensors on your finger joints so you can type in the air, or not even type, just make those cool cyberspace moves like Keanu did in the 1998 movie of Gibson’s story “Johnny Mnemonic.” And we can also suppose the system has speech recognition and you have earphone buds perched in the porches of your ears and a mike taped to your throat. Everyone is mumbling and twitching and wearing flickering contact lenses.

But how does it feel to plug into a system that’s say, a million times as smart as a person. You can have agents for yourself in there doing searches, computing things. Of course if they’re so frikkin’ smart, why would they obey you?

When you plug into the supercomputing web, it’s like you go out of yourself into the seamless web mind, and then you come back. Some thoughts you can’t remember until you’re plugged in. You just remember links. You can speak by exchanging links. But real physical life goes on.

When you unplug and go outside, you’re the same. Having supercomputation around doesn’t really change things much when you’re offline and being yourself. People are still the same as in Bruegel’s time. At least this is the situation I need in order to write a story about these people.

Comments?

I gave a talk at a think-tank called the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto yesterday, for a group called the FutureCommons that meets there once a month. It was a nice alert audience; I felt happy to be among tech dreamers. Michael Liebhold introduced me. He's into this cool new thing called “locative media”, which involves computer realities that are pegged via GPS to realworld locations.

My fellow author Howard Rheingold was there. He decorates his own shoes with spatters of acrylic paint. He says he used to draw patterns, but with splatters, you don’t notice when bits chip off. Before my talk, the group of maybe fifty people stood in a circle and played an encounter-group game. Good old California.

I was promoting my Lifebox book as usual these days. Sell it, Ru! You, too, can experience the multimedia wonder of my talk two ways.

(1) Read the Talk Slides, saved in the friendly PDF form rather than the demanding PowerPoint format.

(2) Listen to a 40 Meg MP3 of my talk on ”Gnarly Computation”. This is better quality than the last MP3 I tried to post. Click the link above or click on the icon below to access the podcast via , which mirrors my Gigadial feed.

It’s thanks to a tip from reader Lisa Williams that I’ve made Rudy Rucker Podcasts called “Rudy Rucker” on Gigadial.net, which will place poddy wrapper tags around the mp3 for those interested. Geekin' out!

After my talk, the ultrageek (and very nice guy) Jerry Michalski led a discussion about theories about the ultimate nature of reality other than my “universal automatist” thesis that everything is a gnarly computation. As the discussion rambled along, a charming woman named Eileen Clegg made a realtime visual representation of what people were saying. She does this for a living! This photo I took is not, she protested, the final form of the image that she’ll produce.

After the talk we had dinner in an Indian restaurant with suitably gnarly food. Jerry Michalski told me about some software called “The Brain” that he has been using for years to maintain and every ramifying computer model of his mind. He codes in every link between new ideas that occurs to him. Information about Michalski’s brain is available online at his website. This guy is Lifebox-ready! One minor problem is that, just today of course, the link to his brain gives an error message…

I’ve been doing a lot of promo for the Lifebox

book.

There’s an interview with me in the Locus science fiction magazine, September, 2005, issue, with photos by Beth Gwinn (such as the one above).

I have Lifebox-related article called “Adventures in Gnarly Computation” in the October/November, 2005, issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine. The article's online at this link, with a slight misprint: the first letter is “W” not “T”.

And this afternoon I’ll be at the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto. I put up a Powerpoint for the talk, and maybe I’ll capture and post some audio.

***

On another topic, I’m almost done reading the best literary book I’ve read in a long time The Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell.

The Cloud Atlas is actually six short novellas (or long novelettes), about 20,000 words each, arranged in this curious onion-like way. That is, five of them are cut in half and nested, so that the book’s structure is: 1a 2a 3a 4a 5a 6 5b 4b 3b 2b 1b. The author compares it to a matryoshka doll, that is, a nested Russian doll with dolls inside. Or to a music piece with six solos, each of which is interrupted by the next solo, and which then takes up when the intervening solos are done. What’s really cool is that in each successive story, a character reads or sees the first half of the preceding story, and then when a given successive story ends, the character gets to read or see or show us the second half of the preceding tale.

The fifth and sixth novellas are both science fiction. I’d been prepared to be resentful of the slumming literary mandarin, but, hell, they’re damn good. Number six, “Sloosha’s Crossing and Everything That Came After,” reminds me of Russell Hoban’s superb Riddley Walker. “Trubba not.” And the fifth is “An Orison of Sonmi-451”, which is a lovely tale. Very serious, but not humorless. Odd in good ways.

The “Orison” is about cloned slaves in a future fast food place with the “logoman” Papa Song, I guess he’s a hologram, he stands on a plinth and gives them exhortatory morning sermons and later in the day entertains the customers. He’ll, like, pretend to surf on waves of noodles, or throw holographic boomerang “fire �clairs.” What makes the style really great is that the person describing this, the “ascended” (= become intelligent) clone Sonmi has a very flat, matter-of-fact, wise tone, and doesn’t see any of this as funny. Even though the story is satirical. I guess Brave New World was like that, satirical and, if you think about it, funny, but with the events treated in all seriousness by the protagonists. Actually by the end of the tale, the satire gets so sharp and pointed that it’s more horrific than funny.

This and Charles Stross’s Accelerando do a lot to raise the SF bar. Synchronsitically enough, Charlie too talks about Matryoshka dolls. Except his are Dyson spheres.