by Jan Malakhovski, version 0.18.1, created , published , updated
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An exocortex (or exobrain) is a device that plays a role of “an external information processing system that augments the brain’s biological high-level cognitive processes”. In other words, it’s a device that does human intelligence amplification. At the moment of writing, this type of device exists only in the realms of science-fiction. However, if you only care about the software-defined information processing and intelligence augmentation features of such a device and not its neural brain-machine interface, then, with a bit of effort, you can have most of said features today.
Henceforth, a personal exocortex software system is defined as a software setup that does personal exocortex-like things, but using widely available conventional computing devices and operating systems. In other words, it’s an “extended memory” and “external brain” software system that
(Should you have such a personal exocortex software system, you could then make a good approximation of a sci-fi-like exocortex device the moment a general wearable ubiquitous computer with enough compute, storage, and user-to-device IO bandwidth capacities appears.1)
Why would you even want to use such a thing? Are there any potential dangers with using such a system? What is a good design for it? Which tools can you use to implement it? How can you make your setup private, secure, comfortable to use, efficient, and future-proof? This document aims to answer all of these and other relevant questions.
In other words, this document aims to be a comprehensive introduction, motivation, and DIY guide for wannabe tooling-, self-tracking-, and intelligence-enhanced cyborgs.
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That is to say, modern smartphones, smartwatches, and other wearable computers suffer from the following issues that make them currently unsuitable for exocortex-like usages:
Most such devices have very high device-to-user but very low user-to-device IO bandwidth.
In other words, most modern manufacturers seem to be making devices for media consumption, not productive work.
Some kind of high-bandwidth input device needs to become ubiquitous and reach economies of scale state first.
A neural brain-machine interface would be cool, sure, but a chorded keyboard (which can be implemented on some of the modern gaming handhelds by chording with joystick buttons) or subvocal recognition (but probably not normal speech-to-text), could also work.
Most such devices simply don’t have enough on-board storage.
Most modern manufacturers actually do this on purpose, producing devices with very little on-board storage to up-sell their users on “Cloud” storage subscriptions.
Meanwhile, in my experience, a personal exocortex software system only really becomes useful after you dump 2 TiB or more of data and indexes into it (possibly multiplied by the number of languages you speak/use).
As shall be discussed below, a good personal exocortex software system must be integrated into the OS, such a system is much less useful as “just another app”. Meanwhile, from a technical standpoint, the number of different boot sequences and devicetrees modern mobile devices use makes multi-device OS distribution development unfeasible.
Something like IBM PC’s BIOS and PCI need to be standardized first.
Which is why I think that if such a device ever appears, it would be based on x86 (most likely) or RISC-V (less likely), but probably not ARM, because literally every single manufacturer does their own thing with the latter.
For example, did you know that on Raspberry Pi it’s actually the GPU that boots first, it then enables the SDRAM, loads the Linux kernel from the SD card into SDRAM, and starts the ARM CPU?
So, given all of the above, if I were to speculate, I would guess that a first proper exocortex-like device would be a handheld gaming PC (like a descendant of the Steam Deck or something similar running SteamOS) married to an optical HMD glasses, initially used for AR/VR gaming. But then, somebody would develop a practical wearable high-bandwidth input device, like gloves that could be used as a keyboard, a face mask with embedded electrodes that could be used for subvocal recognition, or some such. And then, a custom “exocortexOS” GNU/Linux distro for such a device stack would be born.↩︎
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