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.