Dr. Carthwright was born in Galeia, Shekland. She is well known for her work towards the development of the memoizer as well as cognitive sciences in general. Upon completion of her undergraduate degree in biochemistry she worked as a research assistant under Dr. Reinart Saelzar. She attained her doctorate researching replaying experiences captured into cognitive plastics.
Career
Shortly after his development of cognitive plastics Dr. Carthwright began work on “replaying” the experiences recorded to other people. Her first successful test allowed people to experience a sunset at the top of a mountain near to the lab. The initial experience only featured visual information based on Dr. Mark Seaborne’s research. These initial experiences typically had only at most 1 sense active for the experiencer, and were limited in time extremely.
Eventually there were experiences made without the use of Generalized Consciousness Modeling, instead opting to record the entirety of a mind as raw data during recording. These experiences, while more in-depth presented a whole host of problems, including:
- Limited range of movement since the environment couldn’t be captured
- Took incredible amounts of storage for relatively short experiences
- Engineers were not used to suppressing their thoughts and would often end up leaking personal details including passwords, addresses, phone numbers, and pin numbers
- Traditional actors would often get injured and then continue a take, but this pain was translated directly into experiencers
- Limited fault tolerance meant a single mistake would require reshooting an experience
- Dissociation leading to a loss of personal identity
- “Ghosting” were after an experience a sensation would linger
- Loss of movement in appendages after an experience with an amputee experience engineer
- Lingering depression after experiences with a clinically depressed experience engineer
Initially Dr. Carthwright took a more human approach, rebranding from slates and GCM recorders, to experience engineers and experience engineering. Along with this change came a slew of guidelines and best practices, but eventually she turned towards implementing protective measures inside the memoizers themselves.
After the Shekland massacres Dr. Carthwright moved more into providing governance and policy around memoizer and experience engineering safety. To this day she continues to work helping provide the proper governance and recommendations to various organizations about how to handle experience engineering appropriately and safely. This includes a media presence as an advocate for safe working conditions, and stringent controls over usage of memoizers.
Shekland proposal
In the aftermath of the Shekland massacres the Shekland proposal was put forth and accepted, it stated that:
- Experience engineers must go through medical and psych evals before recording anything
- A generalized scanning mechanism would be put in place to “roughly” determine what content is harmful
- Limits (to be determined) would be placed on what you are allowed to put in an experience
- while not fully specified if it’s expected for there to be limitations on experiences containing violence, sexual activity and illegal conduct
- All experience engineers and genal consumer must be drug tested before recordings
- Every resident will have an electronic record kept of which experiences they’ve taken part in
These changes made it logistically impossibly for the most part to privately operate a memoizer. Dr. Carthwright worked closely with the Shekland comissioners of Justice, and Domestic affairs to get the policies necessary put in place.
Publications
List shortened for brevity
- Replaying experiences in human beings; Deserializing GCM into human minds (paper)
- Slates & experiences; A new way to live vicariously (paper)
- Multimodal Experiences; Experience engineering with multiple senses (paper)
- Being more real; A full consciousness serialization method (paper)
- Experience Engineering; A more human approach (book)
- Experience secrets; How to keep viewers from getting your passwords (paper)
- Shekland proposal (legislation)
- The aftermath of Shekland (interview transcript)
- What the Shekland massacres mean for us (interview transcript)
- SynthRec; A functional synthetic experience engineering engine (co-author, paper)
- Building a better future; Using memoizers as a treatment path for cognitive diseases (paper)
- Safety in numbers; More data about the effects of memoizers is needed (interview transcript)