On Mon, 25 Dec 1995, Michael McMaster wrote:
> The "memory" is being created but not accessed. Why not? At least
> partially because there is no system that integrates the information
> and makes it available in the temporality that is required.
I think maybe a group of AI's would need to be built to make this
information available.
In William Gibson's "Neuromancer," Tessier-Ashpool S.A., a fictional
privately owned company which owned an entire space station, used AI's to
run their operations. They would sleep in cryogenic suspension, waking
occasionally. Marie-France was the matriarch, and chief designer of the
AI's.
"He couldn't accept the direction she intended for our family. She
commissioned the construction of our artificial intelligences. She was
quite a visionary. She imagined us in a symbiotic relationship with the
AI's, our corporate decisions made for us. Our conscious decisions, I
should say. Tessier-Ashpool would be immortal, a hive, each of us units of
a larger entity. Fascinating. I'll play her tapes for you, nearly a
thousand hours. But I've never understood her, really, and with her death,
her direction was lost. All direction was lost, and we began to burrow
into ourselves. Now we seldom come out. I'm the exception there."
"He stared down into the Imperial Gardens, the star in his hand,
remembering his flash of comprehension as the Kuang program had penetrated
the ice beneath the towers, his single glimpse of th estructure of
information 3Jane's dead mother had evolved there. He'd understood then
why Wintermute had chosen the nest to represent it, but he'd felt no
revulsion. She'd seen through the sham immortality of cryogenics; unlike
Ashpool and their other children - aside from 3Jane - she'd refused to
stretch her time into a series of warm blinks strung along a chain of
winter."
"Wintermute was hive mind, decision maker, effecting change in the world
outside. Neuromancer was personality. Neuromancer was immortality.
Marie-France must have built something into Wintermute, the compulsion
that had riven the thing to free itself, to unite with Neuromancer."
Interesting book. Very deep.
-- Andrew Moreno <amoreno@broken.ranch.org>