The books on the bookshelf. Each with a story to tell – when I bought them, where, and why. Some of them are gifts. There is a tangible sense of our history (theirs and mine) and collective mortality when I run my hand across their spines, and flip through their pages. Sometimes they also contain the stories of unknown others. Many of my earliest memories are book -related – trips to Paico, Amar Chitra Katha purchased at railway stations, and so on. Some of the reasons why, despite not being the calibre of reader (and collector) JP Rangaswami is, I can still easily relate to why he is not buying a Kindle. Because I’ve had a love affair with books ever since I can remember as well.
It is also why I felt sad reading The Immortality of Bits – (from the breaking Smart series)
We are used to thinking of atoms as enduring and bits as transient and ephemeral, but in fact the reverse is more true today.
When software eats hardware, however, we can physically or virtually recreate hardware as necessary, imbuing transient atoms with the permanence of bits.
Sad, because it seems (and I agree) that it is an inevitability. I remember writing Time Vault a couple of years ago in which I had actually expressed a desire for it. 3D scanning objects and later 3D printing them as a way to store memories around objects, even after the original ceases to exist. In the future, we will leap beyond this. The book I just completed reading is Superintelligence, which among other things, traces the possible paths to an Artificial Intelligence much smarter than our species. One such path involves Whole Brain Emulation – a way of scanning and copying the brain on to a computational device. Probably one of the final steps of the augmented human. (earlier posts)
A copy of a human fondly recollecting the memories around a book thanks to its copy. Maybe that’s the future. Will the feeling be the same, will the copy sense that something is missing? Or will it be a whole new reality?