I’ve had a couple of people ask me (and a couple of people not ask, but given their own spin on the title) and so I thought I’d do a bit more commentary on my “Brain” session submission.

From the site (“Your Brain in the Cloud”), you’ll see the description as:

Workflows, Agents, Bots… Not only is our data going into the Net but our decision making processes as well. What constitutes “Me” and how carefully should we consider how much of that resides outside of my own skull? Who owns or has access to that part of us outside ourselves?

So what does this mean?  Well when I first started thinking and talking about this, “Bookworm, Run”, “True Names”, and “A World out of Time” (Peerssa for the state) were some of the works that had already been thinking about what happens when we begin not just using computers, but embedding our own decision making processes into them and then turning over those “mundane” activities to be freed up for more lofty (or just more fun) activities.

Well, as the years went on and many people continued thinking about it, most of the “Serious” work was focused on either higher FPS’s, achieving the holy grail of the Memex, or embedding the decision making processes of Corporations and legal entities into the programs and systems of the machines.  But Moore’s Law marches on and what used to be in the reach of only governments and multi-nationals are now the playground of everyday users, and embedding yourself in various systems comes along with that. 

What I hope to talk about is how this initiative/push/desire – whatever you want to call it – will affect us.  Don’t think you’re part of it?  Have you ever run a tweetbot?  Set up an email rule?  Configured your phone to allow some people and not others at different times of the day?  Used a Bot in an online game?  These are all ways that people today are putting parts of themselves into the cloud without even realizing it! 

So what I hope to do is get us all thinking about what we do outsource of our internal selves, what makes sense to push up and to think about what happens if that repository should be compromised.  While we all want the happy part of “True Names” (“My kernel is out there in the System. Every time I’m there, I transfer a little more of myself.") we also need to be aware of Stross and his vision of multiple copies of self aware selves and how the very idea of identity can be challenged by this. 

And my final plea – if all this sounds interesting, please “Thumbs up” my session either directly or by the link below. 

Tags: Architecture, Coding Outside The Box, Events