The Mystic Jewels and Matrix Miriam @3QD

I’ve got a new piece out in 3 Quarks Daily:

The Mystic Jewels, the Vatican, and Matrix Miriam

From the introduction:

A bit over a year and a half ago I published “Kisangani 2150: Homo Ludens Rising,” a science fiction yarn set a decade later and half way around the world from Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140. Robinson gave us a post-climate change world with pretty much the same institutional structure of the current world. Things were a bit looser in some ways, the very rich were, if anything, even richer, and finance made that world go round. Robinson developed a rich plot in which the financial crisis of 2008 was replayed, but to a different denouement. The banks weren’t bailed out; they were nationalized. Our heroes celebrated by going to Mezzrow’s where they danced “to the tightest West African pop any of them have ever heard.”

My world. As a musician who’s played RnB, rock, and jazz in many clubs and private parties, that world is more familiar to me than the world of financial derivatives and AI-driven trading, where Robinson centered his story. I decided to take Robinson’s world, move ahead a decade, and center it on the activities of Homo ludens rather than Homo economicus. That gives us Kisangani in the center of the Congo Basin and in 2150.

But this story is much earlier than that. It takes place just a few years from now and is about how the Mystic Jewels started Matrix Miriam, their first in a series of projects to create a new architecture for artificial intelligence. A somewhat revised version will be incorporated into Chapter 6 of my book in progress, Play: How to Stay Human in the AI Revolution, where it will be mated with a revised version of “Kisangani 2150: Homo Ludens Rising” and some more fictional material.

This is thus is a work of fiction, and science fiction at that. Though the science aspect is a bit light in this piece, I expect it to get more intense as the story unfolds. You can get a glimpse of that in the working paper I developed from that 3QD piece, Kisangani 2150: Homo Ludens Rising, A Working Paper, in the section, “Discussion with Claude about digital doppelgangers,” pp. 10-14. The notion of a digital doppelganger is derived from Neil Stephenson’s The Diamond Age, where the protagonist, Nell, is gifted with an interactive book, Young Lady's Illustrated Primer, when she is four years old. This primer then guides her education into early adulthood.

I am imagining that in the late 22nd century everyone is gifted with a similar resource which is available to and even accompanies them throughout their life. The relationship is so intimate that the doppelganger is in effect a person’s Mirror. But, what happens to the Mirror when the person dies? I haven’t worked that out, but I imagine that it persists for it is (effectively) immortal. I’ll be doing that in that book, Play: How to Stay Human in the AI Revolution.