Because the future has just started
I have a cool idea for a time travel story. The premise is a touch farfetched, but then again, reality itself seems pretty farfetched these days.
So my story should fit right in. I’m still developing it, but it’s starting to come together.
Over the coming days I will be sharing my process. More tomorrow.
The Madness of King George is one of my favorite movies. A British film released in 1994, and adapted by Alan Bennett from his own 1991 play, it tells the true story of how King George III gradually went insane while he was still on the British throne.
The bizarre $15 billion law suit against the New York Times, which was just summarily dismissed by a clearly nonplussed judge, makes me think of that film. At what point does it become officially obvious that the leader of your country has bats in his belfry and is totally out to lunch?
At what point do even the people who voted for him realize that he has become totally bonkers, wackadoodle and is nutty as a fruitcake? And then what do they do when they finally admit that he has gone off his rocker, is mad as a hatter, and isn’t playing with a full deck?
Maybe there’s a metaphor for that.
Today I woke up early, and made massive changes and upgrades to the software project I am working on. Miraculously, it all still works, and nothing broke.
I call that a good day.
Of course today we immediately cancelled our subscription to Disney Plus. As patriotic Americans, we felt it was our duty.
The people who are attacking the United States of America from within need to be stopped, which means that we need to do everything we can as citizens to stand up for our nation and for its Constitution.
The specific attack this time was not merely outrageous. It was designed to be outrageous, to leave decent people sputtering, and to make us believe that the First Amendment is no longer in effect.
Kimmel was literally fired for telling the truth — for pointing out that the MAGA gang is trying to score political points from the killing of Charlie Kirk. That is exactly correct, and in fact obviously so.
What the MAGA gang (I think Kimmel nailed it with that phrase) is doing is deeply insulting to the memory of Charlie Kirk. How are they choosing to “honor” a man who believed in open debate? By simply labeling anything that they happen to disagree with as hate speech and summarily cancelling the speaker.
I am sure that Charlie Kirk would be utterly disgusted by what Carr and his fellow MAGA uomini di disonore are doing in his name. As Americans, we have an obligation to not let them get away with it.
Now let’s extrapolate into the future, based on what we currently know to be true. We are about to enter an era (we haven’t quite entered it yet), when your smart glasses will be able to record every moment of your life.
This will include not just your words, but also your gestures, your facial expressions, how you interact with different people, how you respond to the things that you see and hear in the world around you. In short, an enormous amount of data that represents you will be available for number crunching after the fact.
People in our generation might resist this data gathering, but people who are young children today will accept it and take it for granted. To a generation born into that future world, the services provided by the companies who gather that data will be too compelling to reject.
Now fast forward another hundred years. Those children will have lived out their natural lives, and they will be dead and gone.
But they will also have left behind a lifetime of moment by moment data. Future A.I. — much more advanced than today’s A.I. — will be trained on that data,
People will no longer ask “What would great Great-Grandpa John have said?” They will simply be able to ask him, and he will answer in his own voice, with the thoughts and opinions that he had held for his entire life.
The people in that future will look upon our own era as a kind of dark age, perhaps the way we regard the ancient world before the invention of writing. They will find it hard to imagine a time so primitive that you couldn’t do something as simple as have a conversation with your ancestors.
Continuing from yesterday…
The pattern of technology creating new opportunities for transcription of presence continued onward with the invention of motion pictures. Before moving pictures, you could look at a photo of a deceased person to know what somebody looked like, but you couldn’t get a sense of their presence — how they moved, how it might have felt to share a room with them.
Note that there is a common theme running through all of these examples. Each new recording technology is immediately useful, but many years later it takes on an added significance.
For example, the first photographers were not taking pictures of people because they were thinking that those people would one day be dead. Everyone might have understood that intellectually, but it wasn’t quite an emotional reality.
Similarly, early motion pictures did not, when they were new, possess the haunting quality that they have now. We look in astonishment at early film reels of people walking around New York City or Paris in the 1890s, and we realize that these people look young and vibrant, and that they are not thinking at all about their own eventual mortality.
Let’s focus in on this split between the immediate long term impacts of any new technology that transcribes presence. When it first shows up, any such technology focuses on the here and now.
But eventually, the value of the same technology comes to be seen as partly forensic. It opens a powerful new window into our past, one that had never before been possible.
To put it another way: Important aspects of recorded history begin with the invention of new recording technologies. But what might this mean for future technologies?
More tomorrow.
Photographs must have seemed astonishing when they first arrived on the scene. The idea that you could continue to see exactly what someone looked like, even after they were dead, must have felt quite radical.
Sure, you could look at a painting, but it’s not the same. A painting is someone’s interpretation of someone else’s physical likeness, not the likeness itself.
When I think back through history, I see parallels with other technologies. Take writing for example. Before the written word, you could learn of the thoughts of a person even after they were dead, through oral tales that had been handed down through the generations.
But, like a painting, these were necessarily filtered through others. The story that you heard was merely an interpretation by somebody else of that person’s thoughts and beliefs, and you had no way to know what had been altered in the transmission.
So there is this idea of any new recording technology as a kind of “transcription of presence”. Suppose we project this idea into the future. Where will it eventually lead us?
More tomorrow.
The president of Brazil wrote a rational, highly intelligent and well reasoned opinion piece, which was published in today’s New York Times. Everything Lula says is not only true, but easy to see once he steps you through the logic of it.
He makes it clear that the primary target audience for his piece is the president of the United States. If the piece has one failing, it is in the implicit assumption that the president of the United States is actually capable of hearing intelligent and well reasoned arguments.
Sadly, the citizens of the U.S. have quickly learned otherwise, with tragic consequences. As my brother once told me “It’s difficult to have a rational discussion when there is nobody on the other side of the conversation.”
Have you noticed that the larger the distance you need to travel, the more annoying is the process?
Walking is easy. Bicycling is a little more difficult. Driving a car is more of a hassle, as well as being more expensive and more dangerous.
And don’t even get me started on airplane flights.
I read today that Americans on the political right are going after anyone who is glorifying the murder of Charlie Kirk. They are publicly shaming such people on social media and encouraging their employers to fire them.
There are many parts of these events that I don’t understand. But to me, the greatest mystery of all is why anyone would think of murder as something to be celebrated, let alone say so publicly.
Sure, I and many others did not agree with things that Kirk said. But when someone is murdered in cold blood because they have said something that you disagree with, free speech itself is also being murdered.