Flight of the Soul

by Kalifer Deil

their virtual existence since these are skills they will still possess. Money can buy a lot of security.

  Carolyne: Okay, But they won’t be legal people who can buy and sell stock.

  Ray: They can use go betweens in the beginning but eventually, you can bet, they will gain legal status as people as well.

  Rev.: I’ll certainly fight that. They used to say that idle hands are the Devil’s workshop. Later it was said that the Devil is in the details. Now it will be said that the Devil is in the computer.

  Carolyne: Hell, I’m already saying it. My computer crashes with great regularity. Thank you Mr. Gates!

  Bob: He’s likely to be one of the early additions to your virtual world. Do we have centuries of buggy software to look forward to?

  (All laugh)

  Ray: Now there are some really interesting possibilities in this virtual world.

  Bob: Wait a minute! If these people are living in a virtual world what connection do they have with the real world?

  Ray: They will have as much contact as they want with the real world with visual and oral communication and as much other communication as they desire or money can buy. On the other hand they may become so habituated to this virtual universe that they will lose interest in the real world. As I was starting to say, they can be anything they want to be in this virtual world, a handsome specimen of a human being, an eagle, a brahma bull, or maybe a mechanical device like a racing car. They would be able to morph from one to another with ease like a character from a sci fi movie.

  Rev.: Or look like a vampire, a gargoyle or better yet the Devil to be true to form.

  Carolyne (ignoring the Rev. directed at Ray): You’re really pulling my leg. That can’t be true.

  Ray: All those special effects you see in the movies are at your disposal since you would be living in a computer generated special effects universe. The tricky part is the sensory wiring but that would all be done auto-magically by electronic switching after the original sensory mapping was worked out.

  Mrs. Altavine (standing and waving her arms lightly up and down “flying” toward the tea tray): You know, I’ve always wanted to know what it would feel like being a bird. Let me fly into the kitchen to get some more tea.

  Carolyne (after Mrs. Altavine is several feet away, leaning toward Ray and whispering): What are you going to do with a senile old bird in your world?

  Mrs. Altavine (half singing): My hearing is quite good Ms. Bluemoon. No tea for you!

  Carolyne: Present Company excepted! (She makes a face and rolls her eyes) Hmmm.

  Bob: I’d say her sense of humor is also quite good as well.

  Mrs. Altavine (from the doorway): Why thank you Mr. Mover. Why don’t you all come into the garden and we can continue this fascinating conversation there.

  Bob: So far this virtual world doesn’t sound half bad. There has to be a down side.

  Ray (gravely): There is Mr. Mover! There is!

  Curtain closes

  Incidental music: “Gravely Tecno1”

  Intermission

  Incidental music: “Gravely Techo2”

  Act II - Garden Scene

  A similar seating arrangement develops as they gather garden furniture around in a semicircular pattern.

  As they take their seats Bob directs his attention to Ray.

  Bob: You were saying, Ray, about there being a down side to all this.

  Ray: There are a number of possibilities here and they will all converge at once. We will build intelligent conscious machines from scratch about the same time if not sooner and they will in turn design machine even more intelligent and so on. Even if we reincarnate ourselves into machines we will be more intelligent and we will be able to add intelligence literally without bounds.

  Bob: Are you saying we, as biological entities, will be largely irrelevant?

  Ray: That could happen if we’re not careful, perhaps even if we are careful. It may be like so many technologically advanced races in the past. The indigenous race gets clobbered.

  Bob: What about Azimov’s Laws of robotics. You know, the ones that are built into robots that prevent them from harming humans.

  Ray: These are nice for the first generation or two but how do you guarantee that future generations, with intelligence way beyond our imaging, will have those same safeguards. I think we must also consider who has the unlimited money supply to build the first truly intelligent machines.

  Bob: The military?

  Ray: Bingo! And if they are designed as killing machines? There go the laws of robotics. The saving bell here is that killing machines are not likely going to be designers of killing machines.

  Rev.: Maybe that’s Armageddon, killer robots roaming the planet wiping out all humans. It’s in the Bible that great machines of destruction will wipe us all out.

  Mrs. Altavine: You mean those of us who are left after all the fire, brimstone and pestilence?

  Rev.: It will all come together!

  Ray: On the more optimistic side, we have portable personal assistants which are more advanced than a room full of computer equipment a few decades before and there is no stopping this evolution. I think the military will actually lag behind this commercial evolution since military equipment has to be designed to far more rigorous standards. I think I have some hope in mankind. Besides smart machines will realize it is cheaper to have humans doing many tasks so I doubt machines would ever wipe out humans. Also, many of these machines will have been humans and will have families they care about who are still human.

  Bob: Humans as slaves then.

  Ray: Probably not as slaves but second-class citizens perhaps. Perhaps this will just be a stage in our own evolution. If it doesn’t happen with great suddenness it may be an inexorable choice of life. At some point each of us will decide whether to go on as a biological entity or whether we will enter into this new state of being.

  Carolyne: What about acting, creating art and music, computers will never do that!

  Ray: That’s what Gary Kasparov said about master’s level chess until he lost his world title to Deep Blue. It’s only a matter of time, and not much time, before highly intelligent machines exist of the non-human no emotion variety. I think you will find it surprising what non-emotional machine can create, even now. Those who were human before will still have the same emotions, esthetic senses and creativity, perhaps much more.

  Carolyne: How depressing!

  Ray: Not when you think about this also being the fountain of youth that gives you everything you ever wished for, albeit mostly in a virtual world in the short term.

  Carolyne: But I like my flesh and blood body!

  Ray: No one is asking you to give it up now. But, when you reach one hundred years old you may not be as fond of your body as you are now.

  Rev.: I believe God will smite you and your kind before this is ever accomplished. God’s wrath will take care of this nonsense.

  Bob: Reverend Faintspell, you can’t be sure of that. Perhaps this is what Heaven on Earth means; that we will all live in a virtual world and it can be anything we want it to be.

  Rev.: That’s hubris in the extreme. Hubris is the last cliff you step off of as you slide into hell!

  Ray: There’s no hubris here, just fact. At the rate of current computational progress the entire population of the Earth will be able to live in a virtual reality universe in a computer the size of a soup can by the year twenty one hundred.

  Bob: But that progress will run out of steam shortly won’t it?

  Ray: There is no reason to believe it will any time soon. There is no reason to believe we can’t build computers atom by atom. We hardly started exploiting the third dimension in chip technology as well.

  Bob: But the world’s population in a soup can?

  Ray: Well maybe a large commercial soup can but most of the bulk will likely be to get the power in and the heat out.

  Mrs. Altavine: What if someone, like a crazed follower of the Reverend here, decides to blow a hole in the
soup can with a bazooka. Won’t billions of virtual people die?

  Ray: It’s really no different than computers now. Perhaps once a week, or maybe continuously, backups will be made and stored in a safe place. Then, in the case of such a catastrophe, this backup can be downloaded into another soup can and restarted. Some of the latest memories may get lost but no virtual people.

  Carolyne: What’s to stop this crazed person from shooting the backup as well?

  Ray: Backup systems would be in a place far removed from the original site. Hey, don’t worry; these people will be a lot smarter than us so they’ll know how to protect themselves.

  Rev.: Who says a follower of mine would have to be crazed to try to stop this? You are inviting the end of the world.

  Ray: I’m not inviting this revolution. It is coming without anyone’s, or perhaps everyone’s invitation. Yes, I guess it will be the end of the world as we know it but then again there are surprises. It isn’t clear we will do away with out bodies. We may eventually have an artificial mind in either an android body or a biological body. We are on the verge of many discoveries which may allow us to rebuild and revitalize our biological bodies. The future is very hard to predict. There will be many surprises, some good, some not so good. As we understand the genetic code and genetic engineering we will also be opening the door to completely new diseases that may be created by disrupters.

  Bob: Disrupters?

  Ray: It would be convenient to label such people terrorists but I think they need a completely different categorization. There are people that do these things for a wide variety of motives: