Some folks have one goal, to have their life preserved for posterity. When considering the sheer magnitude of humanity that has come and gone, there is quite a staggering difference between those who’ve had a lot of information preserved (i.e. less than one percent), and the other 99.99% of humanity that effectively came and went without making a mark.

Sometimes you’ve just gotta go with the flow, versus cementing a legacy. Do good in your lifespan now, so others can in the future.

Or you could just have some French Toast, that always seems to cheer me up!

Here’s the poem for today, and below that I ruminate on the idea of “Posterity” Today.

By: Drew Swenson

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedWords upon a page

Never old, never aged

Unless your dialect evolves

Then your words become mysteries to solve.

Were ancient authors expecting amazement?

Did they anticipate modern effacement?

Will these words last longer than most?

Or will these words be lost, and toast?

- Ai Ai Captain -

Joking aside, it is quite true that a great deal of people effectively come and go as statistics to cite when discussing the whole of human history. We know more about a group of Nerds in Greece, versus the overall population.

I mean, consider the sheer amount of change to the world overall as well. We can barely recognize English as it was 400 years ago, so consider how far our language could evolve… or devolve in that amount of time?

Now certainly these days you can do far more with collecting information about individuals. Now you can create large enough datasets to predict all sorts of behavior based on all that data.

I’ve actually seen a few instances where GPT Models have been trained on data from a dozen different celebrities, and they’re all able to respond in similar manners, WITH live audiovisual graphics.

Being based on the 3.5 and now 4 GPT Models, these “Ai Hosts” can have lengthy discussions in the exact voice and manner of the individual in question. If you consider the binary nature of our sense “hot, not hot, cold, not cold, etc.” would it not be theoretically possible that it could begin to build a conception of it’s “environment” if exposed to particular stimuli?

Casual meandering aside, The Athene AI Show on Twitch has been a fantastic source of entertainment for the last several weeks, and in many ways several of the hosts are uncannily accurate, especially George Carlin.

Anyway, I find it fascinating that we are at such an unprecedented time for “Ai” research. I’m not thinking Skynet or anything, that would be silly… We’ve got at least 2 or 3 more iterations of GPT and similar LLMs before we’d need to be that worried.