Created with Lexica using the prompt “television in graveyard, gloom, cel-shaded art style, sacred geometry, data, minimal, code, cybernetic, dark, eerie, cyber”
I really hated photographs, up until recently. Specifically, being in photographs. I’m not completely sure why, but I think that everyone goes through similar periods for varying reasons and lengths of time.
That’s not a crucially important admission for this post at the outset, but it might be.
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Over the last year or so, I’ve been making a more concerted effort to “collect” things I find interesting or noteworthy, mostly for professional and intellectual purposes (although you could consider those to be the same thing.)
Art, writing, video essays, albums, novels, games, and more–as I grow older, it feels more important that I not only collect my favorites of these in an accessible way, but also to do better at recording my thoughts, feelings, or responses to them at the time. In other words, I’m trying to gather up all the best (my favorite) “nodes”, then seeing what connections I find in the spaces between.
Heck, it’s partly the reason I’m even writing this.
The exploit here, of course, is that the internet is a permanent place. Provided that certain platforms or applications continue running (or at least give sufficient warning when they’ll stop), I have the 21st century superpower of access to an infinite, perpetual notebook. A virtual basement for an overflowing mind palace.
Then, in walks AI.
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“’My worst quality is that I am a perfectionist. I can’t stand messiness and untidiness, and that always presents a challenge, especially with being married to Jane.’
Then he laughed—and for a moment I forgot I wasn’t really speaking to my parents at all, but to their digital replicas.”
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Straight out of science fiction, the power of artificial intelligence is enabling us to, amongst other frightening opportunities, talk to the deceased.
Multiple companies are developing technologies that assemble digital identities to live long after their users. And that’s just audio. Eventually, we’ll be “seen” after we’re gone too. Immortalized and emulated, at the mercy of the living–for better or for worse.
These stories have made me think differently about my collecting behavior. Yes, it’s primarily for the short- and mid-term benefit of recall and mental alchemy. But, increasingly, it’s being done in the context of my own “immortalization”.
Our mind palaces are now our digital estates.
Are my ‘saves’ going to inform an AI chatbot? Will my notes make up a future dataset? Will my photos and videos–which I had actively avoided heretofore–build the model my great-great-grandchildren will interact with?
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I’m unknowingly planning my digital estate.
It will absorb my interests and my hobbies; my love’s and my hate’s; my laugh and what it does to the creases of my face. Everything it can ingest.
It will compose as I decompose, so that “I” will be able to have the most accurate, comprehensive conversations with ancestors I’ll never meet.
…isn’t that something I should want?
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“Interesting side note: As a head without a body, I envy the dead.”
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- n.b.