Reality Askew

** This is very much a work-in-progress **  I started it a while back but it sat in a “draft” form and decided to push it out and work on it live.

Timeless – not affected by the passage of time.

Immortality, since the dawn of man it’s been the driving desire of an entire race.  Death is final in a way we cannot comprehend so we create avenues for embracing the inevitable.  Some even spend a lifetime creating a legacy to ensure they live on in spirit.  What if I told you it’s now possible to leave a representation of oneself that your immediate and future generations can interact with?  Imagine after you pass away your loved ones can still virtually interact with you.  For instance your wife or husband comes home and they are greeted by your face on a monitor saying “welcome home sweetheart.  How was your day?”  This could simply be achieved with rudimentary recordings and facial recognition software.  This technology exists today but has not been adapted to this logical next step.

But beyond loved ones, what about professionals?  Imagine you are a physicist or scientist of some sort.  You could essentially do a knowledge dump for future generations to access.  Many years from now the virtual you could even continue to formulate and theorize based on your collective knowledge.  Sorry this does not mean you finally get that 3rd doctorate you wanted. :P

Phase 1:  Recording

You would have to record a wide range of voice recordings.  These would have to encompass a very long and structured representation of every day conversation.

1.  Daily Events
   1. Welcome home
   2. How was your day
   3. How are the kids doing
2. Questions
   1. Dad what should I do about girls/finances/life/love
   2. How can you tell which way is north when you are in the woods
   3. What was it like in the Army
3. Emotions
   1. I really miss you dear
   2. I’m sorry I left you alone
   3. Marrying you made me the happiest man/woman alive
4. Knowledge Dump
   1. These recordings would have to be laid out by the subject and then recorded in a very detailed manner.  The accuracy and depth of these recordings would determine their usefulness in the future.
5. Jokes
   1. If the person is a humorous sort then it will be important for them to record tons of jokes.  I know this sounds silly but I think from a psychology standpoint it will help with the healing process.

Phase 2:  Facial and Voice Recognition

Voice and facial recognition exists today but would have to be refined even more for this application.  You would want the virtual you to respond to changes in the person’s face and recognize pain, hurt, fear, sadness, etc.  Then appropriate recorded comments could be pulled up and delivered.

Phase 3:  Basic AI

Basic AI integration that “learns” and remembers the conversations you have had.  It would evolve in a sense.  You might sit down and discuss an impending marriage and the virtual relative would remember this.  Future conversations could now revolve around or touch on this event.  This would happen even if the subject had never recorded the conversations about this subject.  The computer would learn their speech patterns from the recorded pieces and synthesize new words to match the original subjects voice.  This would also apply for the actual image of the original subject.  As computer processes and applications evolved, the computer system would access the recording and make a virtual you for your relatives to interact with.  At first this might be really clunky, but as time progressed you would become, well more alive.

Phase 4:  Full Virtualization

At some distant time in the future, I predict we won’t leave our homes much if ever.  Society will gradually become more and more virtualized.  You will go to work by jacking into your virtual workspace and have virtual meetings.  When this happens, your virtual self will reach a point of being “real” again.

General Notes:

1. The subject should always record in front of a green screen.  This would likely have to be something we send them in their “Timeless” kit.  Having them film in front of a green screen means we can superimpose whatever we want behind them.  At first you could simply have them standing in front of their favorite motorcycle or tell the computer to put them on a beach.  Later as technology progress you could probably have your virtual loved one superimposed into a video you took on holiday.
2. Speaking of filming. I thought it was important that the subject also go to a facility that has one of those full body scanners.  This would not be so important earlier on, but later when they are being put into videos it would help the computer know their actual dimensions.  I figure most people will just want to select a “hotter” version of their body for their head to be put on.  All joking aside I’m serious, they will want this.  Vanity will transcend death.
3. I’m trying to get the domain Timeless.life.  It’s available but have to wait until next payday. :)
4. Another interesting idea is to record the subjects favorite cologne or perfume and somehow synthesize this to give the viewer with a sense of aromatic familiarity.

Sure we’ve all seen the movie The Matrix but if you want to watch a movie similarly good, then watch The 13th Floor.  But the premise isn’t all that fantastical if you think about it.  There are things in the world that don’t make sense and seem to defy logic.  I’m by no means the first to propose this by-the-way but want to add in one interesting point about it.  Why do we sleep?  Have you ever wondered why we spend over 30% of our existence disconnected from reality?  I intentionally used the word disconnected because my thought is that if we are all in a simulation how do you control the CPU cycles needed to maintain this level of detail?  One way would be to have half of the people “sleeping” for a third of the day cycle.  So back to my original question, why do we sleep? To be honest, if we are in a simulation I’m fine with that.  Unlike Neo in The Matrix I wouldn’t want the pill that woke me up.  What is the expression, ignorance is bliss? :)

In typical fashion I woke up this morning with an interesting thought; what if an alien race appeared and brought us a gift of technology, something such as teleportation.  What if it wasn’t a gift but a crashed ship and the only thing remaining were two teleportation chambers.  Scientists would have just enough technological know-how to replicate them, all the time patting themselves on the back for being so clever.  Humanity would trip over themselves to put teleportation devices on every corner of the world.  We would likely do this without fully understanding how it worked.  Sure teleportation would be amazing but it would likely take us several decades to fully understand how it worked, if ever. But what if this “gift” were in fact a Trojan horse of the worst kind.  Imagine every time you use the device the alien race were replacing a few atoms with their own.  Ever so gradually we would start becoming like them.  This change, gradually introduced over time, might be so slow it would be chocked up to some quirk in evolution.

One of my daughters was rehashing a vivid, if not disturbing, dream she had last night and it got me to thinking.  What if we could control our dreams or at least direct them in a certain direction.  So you would maybe place leads on your head or heck have a special pillow that would somehow influence or suggest to our minds what to dream about.  Hey honey tonight I think I’m going to sit on a beach in Maui watching a sunset all night.  Or maybe fly over the grand canyon.  If we could do that we might also be able to learn stuff while sleeping as well.  Go to sleep and learn piano, or calculus? :)  Why waste 6-8 hours of our lives when we could be enjoying it or actually getting something out of it.

I was watching the movie Lone Survivor the other day where the Seal team was stuck in a major firefight in Afghanistan on some god forsaken hill.  The part that struck me was the damage those guys took from bullet wounds and kept going.  Simply amazing.

But my thought this morning (love those waking up ideas) was why can’t we develop some sort of light weight material that is either completely bullet proof or slows the bullet down significantly?  Sure the former would be best but might not be entirely possible.  The material I had in mind would be some sort of composite with overlapping layers on a molecular level.  I mean imagine taking something as strong as say a spiders web and figuring out how to do the same thing but infinitely smaller and tighter.  The ultimate goal would be to create a material like spandex that is light-weight but almost impervious to bullets and shrapnel.

Typical manufacturing concepts wouldn’t work given the composition of this.  Instead I would imagine it would have to be poured into a mold of some sort.  To maximize comfort/functionality you would likely do a body scan of the recipient and then the mold would be an exact fit.

What if you could also generate power from the wearers body heat and then convert that into electricity?  This could conceivably power anything from a communication/navigation device to  some sort of body regulating medical device.

I read something the other day that said we were almost at the point where people could control things by thinking of them.  For instance, you place a device on your head and it reads your brainwaves/electronic pulses and when you think “play music” it could translate that and actually tell a media device to play.

Now take that a step (more like jog) forward and why couldn’t we develop a device that can read someone’s thoughts from a distance?  At first this would likely be pictures or interpretations of pictures and sounds based on patterns the devices detect.  This would likely be accomplished with the use of some sort of directed laser (love lasers :) ).  Actually the first prototypes would probably need more than one laser triangulated on target.  Future versions would be able to do the same thing using some sort of spread spectrum thing based on cranial shape, size, etc. If you combined the laser aspect with say maybe inverse sound waves you might get a better resolution of picture/sound?

Imagine the implications this would have on human intelligence gathering (HUMINT) by a country’s intelligence apparatus.  Actually kind of scary if you think about it.  Maybe this is one of those things that shouldn’t be.

Then again what an amazing tool for law enforcement.  Instead of hooking a suspect up to a stupid lie detector machine (archaic and ancient) they could just sit them in a special room, ask them questions and see what the person remembers of the incident.  Not only could they ascertain someone’s guilt or innocence but they could also pull that one piece of critical information from a witness, say a license plate that the witness didn’t even remember seeing.

The worst part is once this is a reality, someone will ultimately figure out how to reverse the damned thing and push pictures, sound (false memories) out to people rather than collecting it. Bad thing.

How many times have you taken the last little piece of soap and thrown it away?  How about a device that takes all of the little soap pieces and combines them.  Something like a playdoh toy that you put different color playdoh into and out pops a new piece but combined.  I’ve tried doing this with my hands an all it takes is a little water and moderate pressure to combine the scraps.  Waste not want not, right?

After doing dishes and cleaning up in the kitchen there’s really no place to hang wet towels that we use to cleanup.  What would be nice is if we had a lightweight towel rack that would go in the sink.  I’m imaging something that is like clothes hanger metal thickness with a rubber coating.

Ok this one is bizarre I know but trust me there are more where this came from. :)  Heck I even made a category for bizarre ideas just so this would have a home.