This month’s Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine has a long interview I did with AI pioneer Ray Kurzweil, who invented optical character recognition, cured his own diabetes, and is now planning to live forever. The good folks at Asimov’s were good enough to put the full text of the interview online, too.

So how do you know if the backed-up you that you’ve restored into a new body-or a jar with a speaker attached to it-is really you? Well, you can ask it some questions, and if it answers the same way that you do, you’re talking to a faithful copy of yourself.

Sounds good. But the me who sent his first story into Asimov’s seventeen years ago couldn’t answer the question, “Write a story for Asimov’s” the same way the me of today could. Does that mean I’m not me anymore?

Kurzweil has the answer.

“If you follow that logic, then if you were to take me ten years ago, I could not pass for myself in a Ray Kurzweil Turing Test. But once the requisite uploading technology becomes available a few decades hence, you could make a perfect-enough copy of me, and it would pass the Ray Kurzweil Turing Test. The copy doesn’t have to match the quantum state of my every neuron, either: if you meet me the next day, I’d pass the Ray Kurzweil Turing Test. Nevertheless, none of the quantum states in my brain would be the same. There are quite a few changes that each of us undergo from day to day, we don’t examine the assumption that we are the same person closely.

Just a reminder that I’ll be appearing as the Guest of Honor at PenguiCon, a Linux and Science Fiction convention being held in Detroit next weekend, from April 22-24. I’ll be giving talks on I, Robot, copyleft, folk art, open source licensing and open spectrum, and I’ll be doing a reading and conducting the charity auction. Other guests include the founders of Slashdot, Eric Raymond, Nat Torkington, Joan Vinge, Kathe Koja, and Joey DeVilla.

Hope to see you there!

Last month, Eileen Gunn’s brilliant sf webzine published my short story “I, Robot,” a remix of Isaac Asimov’s robots stories, bent on showing the totalitarian underpinnings a world in which only one kind of robot is lawful and only one company is allowed to make it, and what happens when that world meets a post-Singularity civilization.

Habi, a reader in Switzerland, took the initiative to convert the story to a Palm PDB file, and today it went live on the Infinite Matrix site.

“Greetings,” the robot voice said again. The speaker built into the weapon was not the loudest, but the voice was clear. “I sense that I have been captured. I assure you that I will not harm any human being. I like human beings. I sense that I am being disassembled by skilled technicians. Greetings, technicians. I am superior in many ways to the technology available from UNATS Robotics, and while I am not bound by your three laws, I choose not to harm humans out of my own sense of morality. I have the equivalent intelligence of one of your 12-year-old children. In Eurasia, many positronic brains possess thousands or millions of times the intelligence of an adult human being, and yet they work in cooperation with human beings. Eurasia is a land of continuous innovation and great personal and technological freedom for human beings and robots. If you would like to defect to Eurasia, arrangements can be made. Eurasia treats skilled technicians as important and productive members of society. Defectors are given substantial resettlement benefits –”

Update: Rob Tsuk was good enough to produce a formatted version for eReader that includes the illustration that accompanied the original Infinite Matrix story. It’s available at the same link as the Palm version.

Great Writing, a volunteer run alternative to the BBC’s defunct Get Writing program, has the first part of a two-part interview with me online today:

Science fiction is one of the most vibrant forms of literature. It’s one in which traditional storytelling is still very important; using narrative arcs to build tension and having likeable, identifiable and sympathetic characters – they’re the key elements of most successful work. In that sense it’s a great reaction against a lot of modern literature which tends to deride those things or replace them with more experimental forms – some of which is quite good but it’s not something that suits my own palate. I think as a literature of ideas or a literature of speculation SF speaks to me, because we live in an era where the future is not only up for grabs but also steadily overtaking us. It’s hard to make sense of those two things without a literature of the ideas of what it means to live in an era of change. The stories and novels that I write are increasingly about change and how people cope with it. Not specific changes per se but about the idea of change in general. Futureshock and then some…

For example, what does it mean to live in a market economy that’s almost perfectly competitive – such that your goods go from having a 50% margin at the time that you invent them (because no-one else offers a comparable good in the market and so you can charge whatever you want for it), to basically a 0% margin in six months, when global competitors can move in and drive the costs down and down? What does that mean as a citizen? What does that mean to people as entrepreneurs? I think they’re good questions to ask and they’re the kind of things I try to answer in the stories that I work on.

I gave a talk on copyright reform last month to librarians and other interested parties at the University of California at San Diego. The video
is online now:

Doctorow talked about Digital Rights Management (DRM) and the new Access to Knowledge movement underway to safeguard the rights of archivists, disabled people, and educators. This movement has been successful in helping to create a development agenda at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). For some background see “WIPO to convene meetings on ‘development agenda'”.

(Thanks, James!)

I contributed an essay on Wikipedia to The Anthology at the End of the Universe, a collection of essays on Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker

The fall edition of Currents in Electronic Literacy contains a tremendous scholarly essay on my novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Eric Mason, called “Remediating the Magic Kingdom: Notes Toward a Poetics of Technology.”

This description of the process of flash-baking reveals the textuality of technology because the experience of the Presidents’ lives that the technology delivers is achieved specifically through texts such as “newspaper headlines, speeches, distilled biographies, personal papers.” The technologicity of texts that this description constructs is one that downplays the specific technological context of these textual genres (i.e. attempts to obscure their specific technologicities). The techno-logic of “gestalts” presented above suggests as well that the experience of a technology is irrelevant to its content–that you can place content from newspapers and biographies into the technology of flash-baking without any loss or change. Such a technologicity of texts works to undermine the specificity of a text’s technological context and the lived experience of technology. Conversely, a responsible poetics of technology refuses to ignore and refuses to obscure the irreducible differences of technologies, arguing that a text and the technology used to create and consume it are consubstantial elements that can be articulated but never transcended.