The self-conscious computer

unlike the undefinable 'consciousness'

self-consciousness

is trivial
to implement in computers:

even the blinking lights
of 50s scifi cliche computers
represented a sort of self-consciousness
as they announced its inner state
to the world

and it wouldn't be hard
to add a layer of nano-probes
above the cpu chip
that monitored which subparts
were active or inactive

helping find bottlenecks
inefficiencies
infinite loops

or at the OS level
similarly
monitoring which system calls
are used the most
which processes
are stealing all the cycles

and at the desktop level
which apps get used most
which command sequences

and when this becomes second nature

the principle of
most-often-used = easiest-to-access
will be the fundamental
organising principle

Your OS avatar

(this would have been a slashdot comment
but that thread is way too far along)

if your OS is ever going to adapt intelligently
to your ways of working
it will need a general model
of all the ways anyone works

and a specific model
of your special quirks

even to the level
of a map of your physical workspace
with an avatar reflecting your current posture

and whether you have the teevee or radio on
or when a phonecall comes in, distracting you

we should picture that animated avatar
mirroring the realworld phonecall
then readjusting posture
and resuming old tasks

so add to this OS-mini-sim
a pixellated model of the pc display
that understands
more or less
why you have different windows in front
for different tasks

and can run alternate animations
of all the different
workflow command sequences

(can you guess the 100 commands
you invoke most frequently?)

and all this avatar-modeling
can also be previewed in
seminatural language

a little novel about computer use in general
and the peculiarities of one user




(intermediate stage? an expansion pack
for The Sims
that gives a sim a simulated net connection

allowing socialising
scheduling
research
downloading
multitasking
accidental data loss
etc)

Indra's rainbows

metaphorically (at least)
the mini-images of the zodiac
within each sign
can be viewed as rainbow/spectra

as Indra's spherical dewdrops
refract the full spectrum of white light

but also
a disturbance in any sign
should set up a mirror disturbance
in the mini-mirrors

if they're sensitive

Calculating Yahoo-signs

we've established a
Yahoo-betical order
for the commonest million words

(but immediately loosened this a bit
by re-arranging the elastics)

so when we contemplate
a web community
we can 'light up'
every such word that's been
posted to that community

and light up, too
all the word-pairs, triples, etc

and by the time we get to
sentence-length sequences

most 'stars' we light
will be sentences that occur
nowhere else
than on that community's sites

and the elastics
linking words to phrases
to sentences
to paragraphs
to webpages

should draw all those
into a cluster
that defines that community's
yahoo-sign

A semantic Web of Indra

if a web community
'majors' in entertainment, say
and 'minors' in computers and the net:


we might expect that minor
to 'pull' the entertainment community
counterclockwise, towards computers

and since any group/topic
can have (2ndary) relations
with any other group/topic

there's a distinct 'pull' for each
clockwise, or counterclockwise
a short pull, or a long one

so each topic community might have
13 little subtopics
mirroring the 13 2ndary pulls

Indra's Net is like this