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Your Personal Web Site (PWS)

Why do we need personal web sites?

Because, as intellectuals, we have a valuable and perishable resource- our minds and our individual knowledge and experience. We invest a great deal of resources in training ourselves, learning our professions and practicing what we have learned. We learn by doing and we learn by failing too- we learn from experience and sometimes we learn more from our failures than we do from our successes.

The concept of a PWS is that if we host our personal intellectual property (IP) on our PWSs and develop it in a rigorous manner over our entire careers, we have a way of preserving and sharing our expertise with others that has never been available to any generation that has gone before.

MIT has recently taken the position that it will put all of its course outlines, course materials, even examinations on the web for free. The engineers at MIT are among the smartest in the world. They feel confident that this will enhance the MIT experience- essentially, they are saying that they don't care if someone on another part of the planet wants to teach an MIT course or use the material. The spread of knowledge can only benefit humankind. MIT will, instead, sell the 'delta' factor- that is, the opportunity to actually be in a classroom with the creators of the material; to be exposed to their minds; to experience first hand the Socratic method of student/teacher interaction.

Your PWS is, however, your opportunity to contribute to and be a part of this new world-wide 'hive' mind. Ultimately, if your personal IP is important enough, your PWS will make money for you 'while you are lying on a beach'; that is it will create value separate from hourly effort and independent of its creator and it will outlive you too.

I only wish that the web had been as functional when I was twenty; thirty years ago!

I also have a somewhat selfish reason for wanting the students to have PWSs- instead of emailing their assignments to me and clogging up our network with huge files or, alternately, giving me a wad of paper, I just want their URLs. It also is a resource for future classes to be able to see what previous students have done and, reversing out the work to students, I am now letting them upload their files to their PWSs instead of trying to do it all myself!

(Bruce M. Firestone September 19, 2001.)

What does a Student PWS Look Like?

Well, initially, a student will have his or her resumé on their PWS. They can post their assignments there for their Profs to review. They can post corroborative work there for other student team members to browse and contribute to. They can have password protected space where they can post family history, family photos and other important parts of their lives.

Students can preserve some of their best work; their portfolios; letters of reference (the latter presumably in a password protected space).

Young people will find myriad uses that can't even be imagined now- their PWSs will become their alter egos; their personal diaries of a life lived and a journey with many twists and turns. Music, photographs, video, audio, personal radio, text, drawings and every form of communication is a potential addition to a PWS that accretes over a long period of time- it is like the sedimentary layers of the ocean floor.

Where does this New Journey Take You?

Eventually, when there is sufficient bandwidth, people will goggle into cyberspace ( see Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash). People will create their own avatars and faces will be important. People will meet and greet in cyberspace (the Metaverse as Stephenson calls it).

Your avatar and your personal agent (a software agent that helps you navigate the web) will be combined with your PWS to create a powerful new tool for self expression and learning. They will alert you to new IP that might interest you, new films or music too. They will make travel arrangements for you and keep your calendar too. They will become your friends; they will learn from you and you will learn from them. They may go to school with you and will certainly be on the job with you. Your avatar gives you corporeal form in the metaverse; your personl agent is a learning and personal services tool. After your PWS, avatar and personal software agent reach a certain minimum level of sophistication, it becomes self actualizing. It is neither robot nor cyborg- it is a cyber-borg. Your cyberborg has access to all the tools on the web including increasingly sophisticated AI software agents that can help you in everything from figuring out the best mortgage deal for the new house you and your partner just bought to an investment strategy that will allow you to retire early to the optimal rate of flow ( maintaining laminar flow, say) in a water supply network you are designing. The cyber-borg learns what you learn; it knows what you know. It is created when you are created; it experiences what you experience. It is given control over a Real Life (RL) entity at nano scale that uses telepresence to go where you go and interface with RL. It transcends RL and the Metaverse. It can continue to exist after you die and preserve the knowledge and experience you have gained in a lifetime of effort. Your cyber-borg needs to be taught morality and discipline. It needs to respect Isaac Asimov's rules of robotics (slightly abridged here): Rule 1- I shall cause no harm to humans; Rule 2- I shall not stand by and allow others to harm humans; Rule 3- I shall protect my own existence except where such effort conflicts with Rules 1 and 2. After you pass away, your cyber-borg will need to have a job. It will compete for resources in the Metaverse; higher skilled cyber-borgs will be in greater demand and will be paid more, one assumes. An architect's cyber-borg can presumably get a job in an office running a CAD system; setting up functional programming surveys and much more. It needs to get along with people and other cyber-borgs. It needs to be able to work in teams. I suppose they will compete for resources so that they can get more real estate (for data storage, say) or, more fundamentally, so that no one pulls the plug on a useless cyber-borg that simply takes up netspace or breaks the law (see post script below). (Copyright. Dr. Bruce M. Firestone, Ottawa, Canada. August 30, 2001.) ps. Cyberborgs may become unstable. Since they are lifelong companions and capable of learning, they are likely to experience a wide range of human emotions without the ability to express these fully by, say, experiencing pleasure, falling in love, getting relief through sleep, etc. Cyberborgs would have to be subject to the same types of sanctions as their human counterparts for breaking the law including remediation or even, ultimately, termination.

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