Reconstructions

Poul Anderson, The Boat Of A Million Years (London, 1991).

The Time Traveler tells us what it is like to time travel. Hanno tells us what it is like to be immortal:

"An immortal body needed little exercise to keep fit..." (p. 540)

That is good to know. Imagine someone getting fatter and fatter...or Jonathan Swift's endlessly deteriorating Struldbrugs.

"And Christ appeared before Aliyat where she knelt." (p. 532)

This Christ is an imagined deity, not a historical reconstruction, but AI does the latter as well. It:

considers everything that is known about a past figure and his environment;
assigns probabilities to uncertainties;
models the person;
writes and activates the program;
thus, generates not only a physical appearance but also an artificial mind that senses, thinks and interacts while at the same time knowing that it is merely a temporary construct!

Is this possible? Since the AI is itself an artificial consciousness, there is no reason in principle why it should not be able to generate a subsidiary consciousness that models a historical person. However, Hanno warns Svoboda not to model anyone she knew:

"'They're never quite right. Often they're grotesquely wrong.'" (p. 541)

But he adds to himself:

"Unless memory fails after centuries." (p. 542)

After centuries, he could never be sure which was more accurate, his memory or the AI reconstruction. Then he adds a second qualification:

"Or unless the past was as uncertain, as flickeringly quantum-variable, as everything else in the universe of physics." (ibid.)

This sentence summarizes one key idea in Anderson's Time Patrol series. I suggested here that Boat is a summation.

Might AI reconstructions be able to combine dramatic art with Biblical exegesis? Imagine being part of a crowd scene during the ministry of Jesus, seeing, as far as possible, the original person, not a projected deity. Two Biblical scholars told me that New Testament scholars need not only Greek but also Aramaic so that they can construe possible original versions of sayings attributed to Jesus. Imagine hearing those sayings and experiencing whether they affected their hearers as we are told that they did.