 2 Feb 2004 @ 18:24, by Tom Bombadil
Ever felt like you have spread yourself too thin and that it would take two or three of you to attend to all the demands you face or all the events in which you wish you could partake in a day? Let your avatar or avatars (i.e. fully interactive digital images of yourself) take some of the burden away from you. With the advent of Artificial Intelligence and the ever growing integration of the Internet into everyday life, the concept of meshing knowledge and personality into a digital clone that can search the web for you, sort and send e-mail and interact with others does no longer seem as farfetched as it once was.
So speculates David Brin, in an article about Society and Communication, A New Venture in Communication Softwares:
"The only substantial reform that's been attempted so far has been to set up silly cartoon "avatars" that add nothing to functionality or efficiency of human-to-human communications. It occurred to me that current systems don't take any advantage of the many techniques that people naturally use in complex conversational spaces, like cocktail parties or business meetings. Take for example the easy way we compress, sift, correlate and remember things that other people say—skills we've had ever since the Holocene Era began, tens of thousands of years ago. Skills that haven't yet been translated to the Internet."
David Brin is, among other things, the author of the acclaimed SF novel, Kiln People, which relates somewhat to the subject in a more fantastic/speculative sort of way—or does it?:
"Take the notion of golems—temporary clay people (not clones!)—and now imagine a near future when everybody can make them. Using a "home copier" you ditto your memories—perhaps even a genuine imprint of your soul—and off goes the duplicate to run your errands, attend your classes, or do all the drudgery work. Then, at day's end, you download the golem's memories.
As a citizen of this near future, you've duplicated yourself a zillion times and take it for granted, sometimes being the original, sometimes the copy. You live your life in parallel, sending expensive "study golems" to the library while cheap models clean the house and your real body works out at the gym."
Duplicating oneself "a zillion times", hmmm… Sometimes, one wonders. Is it speculation or has it already happened and how many “me” are there already out there experiencing life under its many guises—the zillion eyes of God in the phenomenological world?
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