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I, cyborg
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Concordia professor Lambert "Scot" Gardiner has spent 20 years developing a digital clone of himself
by CHRIS BARRY
When I was about four years old there was a kid, Barry Schimmel, who lived up the street from me. He was a big red-headed guy, a couple of years my senior, and he may have been mildly retarded.
Barry had taken an early interest in all things technological and was forever building spaceships and cyborgs and stuff of that nature. If you didn't actually go to see any of his projects, he talked the mean talk and it was all very impressive--especially coming from a retarded guy. Even though my older sisters and the other kids on the block were always making fun of him, I, on the other hand, instantly recognized a kindred spirit and desperately wanted to believe in his gift. If this cross-eyed motherfucker, in some sort of a pre-teen Rainman kind of way, could really build this stuff, and I was his friend, then perhaps I too could be privy to "the other world" that he was always refering to. Sounded good.
Now I'm not sure if it was because Barry was conducting his experiments during the height of the space race or what, but his operations were always a very secretive affair and I had to kiss his retarded ass for several months before he finally trusted me enough to allow me a glimpse inside his workshop--the shed in his parents' backyard--on the pretext that he had built a cyborg of none other than myself. Needless to say, I was tremendously impressed with this important achievement and anxious to meet the mechanical me. Maybe we could become friends and I could train him to do my one and only chore--emptying the wastepaper baskets into the garbage.
But it was not to be. Barry was a fraud. A charlatan. It turned out that my cyborg was nothing but Barry and an old metal rake from the shed, which Barry manipulated to make it look as though the teeth of the rake were talking, while with closed lips and speaking through the side of his mouth, he did his best imitation of me "crying to my mommy." My cyborg was actually quite mean-spirited. I was very disappointed.
Me, myself and Siliclone
Ever since then, I have associated people who talk excitedly of cyborgs and avatars and all that 21st-Century Star Trek kind of stuff with Barry Schimmel--that is, as borderline retarded or at least as kind of crazed. I know it's not fair--and possibly not even true--but it's the result of an early conditioning that I just can't seem to shake.
But lately I've had to come to grips with my biases and re-evaluate my position entirely. I'm not happy about this--old prejudices die hard--but I was hanging recently with Lambert "Scot" Gardiner, a brilliant Concordia University professor who has been developing a digital clone of himself for close to 20 years, and who is definitely not retarded. A bit eccentric perhaps, but undoubtedly in firm control of all his mental faculties. If everything goes according to plan, you will be able to have a conversation with Dr. Gardiner's virtual brain, whom he calls Siliclone, long after they've planted his physiological one in the ground.
Gardiner's experiment is based on the concept that the PC--or his Mac, to be more precise--is the closest facsimile of the human brain that science has yet to come up with.
"From the moment of conception we each inherit all the knowledge of our species to date, the tools that over the years have allowed humans to evolve and survive in a harsh environment," he tells me from the porch of his modest waterfront cottage in beautiful downtown Hudson. "Our consciousness is simply an interface that we use to tap into this acquired wisdom that is locked away in each of our brains--it's actually a very similar process to retrieving data out of your PC."
Virtual personality
In this spirit, Gardiner has been tapping in to his inner knowledge by taking notes of his most casual thoughts--the flashes of brilliance that we all occasionally have but invariably tend to forget 15 minutes later--and faithfully entering them in to his Mac every night for the past two decades. Every speech he has given, every book he has written and practically every fleeting thought he has had on both the trivial and the profound are swimming around in his hard drive, just waiting to be fished out by some future computer geek hungry for virtual conversation with a dead guy.
Now I realize that I'm still a little biased but, to be honest, I have to admit that the whole project seems a little Schimmelian to me--or at least like an unfathomable amount of work and dedication considering that the software required to digitally replicate human consciousness has yet to be developed. But Gardiner, who pays pretty close attention to these things, is confident that the nerds out in Silicon Valley will have this minor detail taken care of in the not-too-distant future and refuses to be caught unprepared. "Besides," he jokes, "you've got to do something with your life."
Death-defying doctorate
The good professor claims to have been inspired to create Siliclone after reading about a recurring nightmare that one of his favourite philosophers/academics, the late Bertrand Russell, used to have. Apparently Russell was tormented by a dream in which his last surviving volume of work was finally taken off some dusty old library shelf and casually discarded by some negligent library assistant who'd never heard of him--effectively wiping out his legacy and negating his entire life's work.
"In a very small sense this has already kind of happened to Bertie," laments Gardiner. "You simply don't hear as much about him since his death. I just think it would be so great if you could go online and have a chat with the guy--well, not the guy exactly, but a digital representation of the man which could answer questions that you posed to him. So this is what I'm hoping to create with myself and Siliclone."
Well yeah, sure, and I would like to have sloppy virtual sex with Marie Curie sometime soon as well, but I'm not exactly holding my breath in anticipation of her great cyber deflowering. But then again, I'm not as tuned in to the future as Gardiner, who has spent much of his professional life involved in various think tanks hired to provide governments and corporations with the inside dope on what the future holds for society--and paid top-dollar for the service. Former prime minister Pierre Trudeau used to take time off from governing the country to sit down and hang with Gardiner's think tank, the Gamma Group, and get the goods on what the future had to offer. So despite my intrinsic skepticism, I suppose it may be safe to say that Gardiner's credentials are pretty good and his ambitious project a little more grounded in reality than Barry Schimmel's scientific escapades.
Great Scots
He is, after all, an award-winning author of several mid-'70s books on the psychology of learning and is reputed to be the man who inspired the cut-and-paste function on the world's first word processing program, Macwrite. No slouch, this Gardiner. As a child in his native Scotland he was abandoned by his parents, bounced around from foster home to foster home and kicked out of every school he attended. Yet he still managed to abandon his life as a chicken-farming layabout in the dirt-poor hills just outside of Glasgow to come to America and eventually secure himself a PhD in Psychology from Cornell. Just like the plot of a sappy TV movie, through sheer will and an above-average intelligence, the guy has succeeded in beating the odds to become an important academic--if you're prepared to accept that there truly is such a thing.
With respect to his dedication to Siliclone, I don't know, maybe it truly is a Schimmelian undertaking that promises to go nowhere. And perhaps if Siliclone ever does end up being realized to its full capacity, the only conversations it will be able to conduct with the living will be drunken ones (Scot does likes to drink, maybe not to excess, you know, but certainly most of Siliclone's data gets input late at night, just before its jovial creator passes out for bed).
But if nothing else, Gardiner deserves credit simply for the tenacity involved in continuing with the project for all of these years. To go ahead and write him off as a deluded old coot with nothing better to do than enter drunken ramblings in to his computer would probably be a big mistake. So I won't do that.
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