![\"Optimized-shelf](\"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/12\/Optimized-shelf-copy-1024x900.jpg\")
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The books on the bookshelf.\u00a0Each with a story to tell – when I bought them, where, and why. Some of them are gifts. There is a tangible sense of our\u00a0history (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<\/a>. 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)\u00a0JP Rangaswami is, I can still easily relate to why he is not buying a Kindle<\/a>. Because\u00a0I\u2019ve had a love affair with books ever since I can remember<\/em> as well.\u00a0<\/p>\n It is also why I felt sad reading The Immortality of Bits<\/a>\u00a0–<\/em>\u00a0(from the breaking Smart series)\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n We are used to thinking of atoms as enduring and bits as transient and ephemeral, but in fact the reverse is more true today.<\/em><\/p>\n When software eats hardware, however, we can physically or virtually recreate hardware as necessary, imbuing transient atoms with the permanence of bits.<\/em><\/p>\n Sad, because it seems (and I agree) that it is an inevitability. I remember writing Time Vault<\/a>\u00a0a 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\u00a0species. One such path involves Whole Brain Emulation<\/a> – a way of scanning and copying the brain on to a computational device. Probably one of the final steps of the augmented human<\/a>. (earlier posts)<\/p>\n A copy of a human fondly recollecting\u00a0the 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?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The books on the bookshelf.\u00a0Each with a story to tell – when I bought them, where, and why. Some of them are gifts. There is a tangible sense of our\u00a0history (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 […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[98],"tags":[2005,4989,4949,4977,4489,1160],"class_list":["post-11086","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-future","tag-atoms","tag-bits","tag-books","tag-breaking-smart","tag-jp-rangaswami","tag-reality"],"aioseo_notices":[],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11086","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11086"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11086\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11118,"href":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11086\/revisions\/11118"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11086"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11086"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11086"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}