(2011-12-21) Rucker Lifebox Update Stross

Rudy Rucker is guest-blogging at Charlie Stross' space. His first post updates his LifeBox thinking, crossing it with the concept of immortality, tying that to his NestedScrolls autobiography. His MVP is simply a Search Engine attached to blog archives. In the comments, he notes yes, the hard part is animating the lifebox, putting the ghost in the machine. I'll say a bit more this in my next post. This said, if you have a large enough data base, you really can have your lifebox fake being you quite well. I Commented to wonder if there's a way to merge a blog dataset with ELIZA code.

Update: 2nd post. For a fully effective user experience, I'd want my lifebox to remember the people who talked to it. This is standard technology--a user signs onto a site, and the site remembers the interactions that the user has. In effect, the lifebox creates mini-lifebox models of the people it talks to, remembering their interests, perhaps interviewing them a bit, and never accidentally telling the same story twice--unless prompted to. Suppose you developed a lifebox version of yourself that worked quite well. Then what? You might start letting your lifebox carry out those online-interview gigs that you don't have the time or energy to fulfill... An alternate hope is that there may yet be some fairly simple model of the working of human consciousness which we can model and implement in the coming decades. The best idea for a model that I've seen is in a book by Jeff Hawkins and Sandra Blakeslee, On Intelligence. Their model describes a directed Evolution based upon a rich data base that develops by continually moving to higher-level symbol systems.