Last night saw the airing on Sky 1 here in the UK of the Battlestar Gallactica prequel Caprica. BSG was a fantastic series, and was seemingly accessible science fiction throwing in a hint of West Wing.
The first 2 episodes really set up the story as you would expect but I was not expecting the subject matter to resonate quite so much with some of the real world virtual work that we are all doing.
Caprica is set fifty or so years before BSG on a distant resembling earth in many ways. In the first programme a group of teens are engaging in attending v-clubs. Virtual night clubs. These clubs are an underground movement and accessed using a headset “holoband” to inject the photo realistic images into the users head. The places themselves are portrayed as a wild noisy and dangerous night clubs, hidden from parents knowledge.
One of the teens is the daughter of the richest man on the planet who happened to invent and create lots of the tech. She has created a clone of herself inside the virtual environment. Everyone has a physical clone, they showed the use of body scanning in a booth to get physical parameters, but this avatar (and they us that word a lot) is an artificial intelligence construct.
When the real teen is killed her AI lives on in the virtual world. We get to learn that she did not simply download here brain data to a computer core (an often used idea), but instead the AI learned who it was to be the girl through the digital trails that she had left during her life on the world. In this environment indicating that the algorithms to search and learn were clever enough to reconstruct and then move forward as a person.
The father then seeks to perform what can only be described as a Frankenstein manoeuvre, and attempts to place the AI data into a physical manifestation of a robot, or Cylon. The digital is made real.
Clearly this mainstream science fiction is informed and extrapolates todays science fact. The digital trail we leave today may not yet be enough to reconstruct our personality, but those of us who choose too are certainly leaving lots more clues as to who we are and what drives us than ever before. There are also clearly times when people’s echoes are placed out in the public domain when they did not intend them or want them to be.
I was also reminded of a interesting question I was asked when presenting at a recent conference. “What happens to your virtual presence when you die”.
OK, so we don’t quite inject virtual worlds into our brains matrix style, we don’t have fully functioning AI’s or autonomous robots to download into, but we do have ways to interact online and share who we are and what we think and do. When we no longer participate in the online experiences we still have left a legacy and digital echoes, it’s not just photos and memories anymore.
Of course just as with the film Avatar we may find a large number of people not exposed to current virtual world technology may be a little disappointed but equally many may see these parallels and start to understand the deeper significance to our online presence and why so many of us are so passionate about them.
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