The second self, ASI and elastic time
Over the years, I’ve been intrigued by cyborg anthropology in general. This really means I’ve been interested in how humanity has been interacting with the technology that we are currently inundated with and encumbered by—both physically and mentally.
There are a couple of concepts that seem to be on a journey towards each other: the second self and, by association, elastic time. But as we barrel ever faster towards ASI or something closely resembling AGI, we might discover something else: technological precognition.
Before we get on to that though, there are a couple of things to unpack before we think about what's coming on the horizon. The second self is an easy way to refer to your online presence, what you choose to show to the world and what the world chooses to show you via this layer of crafted demiconsciousness.
Elastic time refers to how your second self interacts with different things at different times but realises itself when its biological host interacts with it through the menagerie of apps and websites. You can experience this when you check a WhatsApp group message after a weekend away in a place that didn’t have a signal. You are biologically downloading information that is stored by your digital side.
While the second self is isolated from its biological master, the interaction it has is akin to a passive sponge, taking in all the information and remembering everything in an instant archive. With the advent of group chats on apps like Whatsapp and Discord, there are multiple second selves passively interacting with each other consistently on your devices.
In elastic timelines of our connected universes, the idea of time itself starts meaning different things to perception when viewed subjectively creating elastic snapshots of meaning. This generates mutual understanding and expression metaphorically within the internet, but literally within a collective mind.
Artificial super intelligence aka ASI. is specifically aimed AI at targeted issues to solve. The current dream is to be able to create an ASI that can finish science, which sounds wacky to even consider, but super smart people across the world are taking this aim seriously. In my point however, I wanted to look at what affect a targeted ASI could do to your second self, naturally linking our second selves to eachother in these joint spaces.
ASI in this case would be able to sift through these elastic timelines in our absence, creating and maintaining a black box-esque conversation between your second self and other entities contextually interacting with it, you and the duality of the two.
When a digital clone of yourself, within the context of a closed environment, has the freedom to interact with others of it’s kind; in a different version of the same timeline. The results of these interactions are likely to be increasingly deeper than any one online interaction. It will sooner come across as telepathy.
This idea of technotelepathy isn’t exactly accurate though, it would be closer to technological precognition, which for the time being I’ll call TPC. In the context of the group chat, chats would happen before their biological counterparts have them. What then, would a normal conversation be worth?
TPC doesn’t exist without the biological conversation. The conversation would then be it’s own prompt, which without updates would circle the same information. Not to say it wouldn’t be interesting or have it’s own merit, but it would have input in the current conversation. Instead the second selves would monitor the chat, with each input would have the finite amount of conversations that could spin off from it.
One of these finite options would be the correct way the conversation went, but the potential conversation that could have been real, has already taken place, all be it in a simulated realm. The longer this happens the more predictable the biological counterparts would become. If all second selves are in agreement with where the conversation is going it can interject speeding up meaning and understanding within the group.
The digital hivemind would get things done in a fraction of the time, while the biologicals would have veto powers over decisions made on their behalves. Though, as time progresses, the need for the veto would get less necessary. The hive mind would become, in essence, the conversation and the biologicals would just be their to download information.
This notion, however dystopian or utopian you might see it as, is yet to be named. I was spitballing some ideas around the other day. So, this is what I’ve come up with: TPC/cog, Bubble, projection, double, holo, DS (digital self), perception, counterpart, update, monitor, constant, mind, sift, absence, duality, or clone. My current favourite is between cog, absence, constant, and counterpart. Though I feel counterpart is the most accurate at the moment.
If something like this does happen, and it is likely to, then the people of these chats will live on longer than their biologicals. Leaving snippets of a communal soul, to be absorbed by an advance form of AI down the line. Is this a step to a version of digital immortality? Or will it just be an echo of humanity in the memory of the next step of human evolution?