100 years from now, I want to be a robot dog, and I want Kelsy to by my robot human. It is very likely that in 100 years we will have the capability of creating robots of some sort. I mean, we can make robots now, and they can do all sorts of tasks. With the combination of AI and robotics, it is possible for robots to surpass human abilities in many areas. These robots will likely have their own personalities and mental inner lives, and they won’t need me. What would it mean for me to be a robot? I would like an archived version of my life to be uploaded to a robot body so that it can interact with the world after my body has died. I don’t want to be reincarnated in a robot body simply to say that I could do it, or to somehow cheat death. I want to become a robot so that I can work toward undoing the environmental damage I have caused during my life, which has been only slightly greener than the typical consumerist American. People of my generation have caused more environmental damage than any generation of humans before, and we caused all that destruction with full knowledge of what we were doing and what it would cost future generations. I want to atone for my sins. I want to become a robot dog so that I can continue to serve the earth longer than my body will allow. I want to eventually be a benefit to Mother Earth, and not just a burden.
In the year 2023, it is possible to record and archive mountains of data about a person, or a dog. You could, if you wanted, have video of your activities and movements 24 hours a day. I have a watch that monitors my sleep patterns and my pulse rate overnight. I could have a bathroom scale that would monitor and preserve records of my weight and lean muscle percentage. I can easily preserve an ECG any time I choose. I can archive my communications with people throughout the day. I have an app on my phone that listens to the birds and tells me what species of birds are around at any given moment. I can record detailed weather data, financial records, physical activity, GPS data of everywhere I have gone, and what music I listened to as I was driving. Also, with keyboards and voice to text, I can record my thoughts. I can make note of how I felt about the slow death of the biosphere, knowing that I contributed. In the era of TikTok, people can record themselves doing idiotic dances. When I dance like an idiot, I prefer that my dogs are the only witnesses, and I am grateful that they keep my secrets. In the archived version of my life, we will just let the future assume that I dance like an idiot and leave it to their imaginations.
Much of my interest in eventually having a digital archive of my life comes from Kelsy, from our life together and the inordinate impact her death had on me. I knew Kelsy was going to die some day, of course, and when she got cancer, I knew the end was coming much sooner than I had planned. I thought that she would die, and I would feel horribly sad for a short period, as I had when Tess had died. I was not prepared for the impact her death had on me. Because she was my working dog, and because we had gone on so many adventures, Kelsy was a part of me, or I was a part of her, more so than I had experienced with other dogs. Also, I had written her into my novel, as a fictional character. When Kelsy died, a part of me was dying. In order to keep myself from suffering irreversible heartache, I just didn’t let Kelsy die. Since that day in 2016, I have thought of Kelsy every single day. She lives in my mind. Also, I have thousands of pictures of her, and video, and writings and records of our searches together. Kelsy plays an active role in my daily life. She is my scout. She is a mental construct that I actively and passively use every day.
I found Valentino just a month before Kelsy died, and I was acutely aware that I did not have enough puppy pictures of Kelsy. As a result, and also because photography became easier and Tino was ridiculously cute, I have pictures from almost every single day that Tino was a puppy. I have more than 20,000 pictures and videos of Tino. My records of his searches are more complete, and easier to access. I have recordings of his howling, and I have managed to capture audio of some of the funny little words he says. For Kelsy, if I were to have a digital archive of everything that she was, it would be a little harder. The video is of poor quality, and I just didn’t get that many puppy pictures, which is an inexplicable failure on my part. With either Kelsy or Valentino, how would I keep a record of what they were thinking? When Kelsy looked up at me with sweet puppy eyes, was she thinking that she loved me more than anything in the world? Or was she wishing I would give her a cookie? Probably both, but I can’t really know. Of course, when I say I was thinking about a certain thing, such as becoming a robot in 100 years, am I accurately reporting what I was thinking?
I have a memory palace, which I call Kelsy’s Forest. This is a system of loci, which is a mental toolkit that has been around for at least 2,000 years.Kelsy’s Forest is also a physical space, because that’s how a system of loci works. You imagine yourself walking through the physical space and interacting with specified positions, or loci. In this way, I have memorized Morse Code, as one example. When Kelsy and I are robots in 2123, I want for us to be stewards of Kelsy’s Forest, which is a city park near where I live, and also near where Kelsy is buried. When I die, I want my body to be composted, and I would like some kind persons to spread the compost around the park, Kelsy’s forest. Then, when the technology becomes available, I want the archived records of my life and Kelsy’s life to be uploaded to a robot dog and roughly humanoid robot. These robots would be put to work stewarding the forest, keeping it healthy, removing invasives. In particular, in the body of a robot dog, I could chase away invasive species such as eastern gray squirrels, in order to give our native squirrels a better chance at surviving.
If you were to visit Kelsy’s forest in 100 years, and you happened to run into Kelsy and me as we were pulling ivy and chasing squirrels, you could talk to us and ask us about the forest. Because these robots would have an archive of everything I could remember about our lives, I could tell you about which trees we planted, or about how Kelsy and I would go to the beach and she would fetch a stick in the water for hours. I could tell you about the tree I got from Camp Waskowitz when I was 12, and how the Douglasfir was planted in 1973, and I could point to the tree, which would be 200 feet tall. I could tell you about the native species, and how I worked as a native plant steward in the park. You could ask me anything, and I could answer, based upon the entire knowledge of the world, which I assume a robot would have access to in 2123. I could also answer specific questions based on my experience of living next to this forest for decades, and how I felt the forest was an ecosystem, a living organism, and it was my job to be a white blood cell in the forest’s body, a macrophage, eating away cancerous growths and helping the forest thrive. I could tell you how I planned for Kelsy and I to be stewards of the forest for 10,000 years, being uploaded into renewed robot bodies every once in a while, with Kelsy being the dog sometimes and with me being the dog sometimes.
If you came to Kelsy’s Forest in the year 12,023 and you wanted to talk to Kelsy and me about our lives, most of our knowledge and experience would be from after our deaths. I could tell you about the 14 books I had written prior to 2050, and I could tell you about the searches Kelsy and I went on, about the time Kelsy got stuck in deep mud and it took me ten minutes to lever her out. I assume that Kelsy and I would have a lot more to say about the 10,000 years we had spent as stewards of the forest. We could tell you about the fungus living in the soil, exchanging nutrients between the trees. We could probably tell you the genetic relationship of every tree and organism in the park. Maybe we could tell you about wars and world events, in which we did not participate. If a couple of robots could live for 10,000 years, getting new bodies every century or so, as needed, wouldn’t it be more fair if those robots could have started as blank slates, as Kelsy and I did in our lives? Why would intelligent robots, doing useful work, need to be saddled with our archaic memories? I’m sure there will be many robots that get their own fresh starts. Probably, in a million years, looking back between now and then, more robots will have lived than humans. I would not want every robot to be encumbered with the archived life of a human or a dog. But of all the millions of robots that will live in the future, I don’t think it would hurt anything if one of those robots was Kelsy, and one of them was me.
As I said earlier, I would want my archived soul to live on after my death so that I could atone for my environmental sins. You could argue that the best way to do that would be to simply die and be forgotten. To get out of the way and let robots get about the business of undoing all of the damage humans have done to the planet. I don’t wan’t my archived digital life to be a burden on the future or on the planet. I want my life and my experience to help heal the planet in any way that I can. Also, I want other humans to think about being alive, in one way or another, for 10,000 years, so that they will think about what the planet will be like 10,000 years from now. When I go around my city today, everywhere I look, I see garbage. Anthropologists of the future who look back on the year 2023 will have a hard time psychoanalyzing today’s humans and their fixation of spoiling everything and anything that could possibly be beautiful, sticking their garbage and pollution in every possible corner of the planet, covering the globe in detritus. If you want to live for 10,000 years, will the garbage just pile up? Will we build new cities on top of the piles of garbage from old cities? If the earth will be my home for 10,000 years, I want to take care of her. Actually, I want to take care of the earth even if I only live another year. I hope that the potential to live a nearly immortal life on earth would inspire some people to look beyond their everyday lives of fast food and cars, and think about keeping the planet livable for future life.
Also, I would want to be held accountable. If you visited me and Kelsy in 12,023, I would expect you to ask, “What was up with all of the garbage in 2023? Why were people so intent on destroying the planet?” I would want to apologize for my 90 years of living in a consumerist society that obviously was destroying the biosphere with no thought or consideration for other lives. I would want to confess that I did not do enough. And I would want to tell those future denizens of earth, 10,000 years from now, that Kelsy and I wanted to become robots and stick around so that we could undo the damage we had done. Also, I would tell them that I loved Kelsy so much that I could never let her die. I kept her alive in my mind every single day that my body drew breath, and I kept her in my mind and in my life for 10,000 years, living as a digital archive in a robot body.