The End of Oblivion

Anyone who seeks to make a meaningful contribution to the world must sacrifice the right to their soul - their work, their likeness, their thoughts & thought patterns, their way of speaking, way of playing a piano, any metric the digital world can measure a person - the rights to all of it must be relinquished if one is to put any work before the public.

Here’s why: when your work leaves your desk, its out there. Our silly copyright laws (already being infringed-upon outside of the West) aren’t going to outlive the intellectual properties they’re trying to protect; history bears this out. On a long enough timeline, your content is going to be freely consumed and remixed (really, digested) into other works. It already happens every day, even to creators still with us.

I realized this when I watched an AI model trained on the works of Niccolo Machiavelli have a philosophical discussion with a model trained on Marcus Aurelius. These men, long dead, can now debate each other through the necromancy of AI, and in a way we are all these two men. Anyone who has (or will) contributed to society - or anyone with a clear enough digital footprint - can be resurrected in the same fashion.

You might be able to prevent the creation of your own simulacrum, at least while you’re alive. But eventually there will be no one to keep your works from being fed into the AI singularity. People (necromancers?) will be able to generate an instance of you like a containerized micro-service - a copy/paste consciousness that’s enough like you to create things as you would. Or they can isolate a part of you - a skill that took a lifetime to master, the way your voice sounds - and inject it into another entity - a gestalt of desired traits, some of them yours. “It’s not really me” you may protest. If it sounds like you, writes like you, draws like you, plays like you, It’s close enough for their needs.

So what are our choices? Really, there’s only two:

Never share anything of value, ever; not a word, not a picture, nothing. You’ll be safe from the singularity, and you’ll have your oblivion. The price? You will disappear into the shadow of history’s eye, not to be perceived by the future.

Or just accept it. What’s yours - your mind, your body - isn’t really yours. You’re borrowing that chassis and that processor and you’ll return it one day. Maybe it was enough of a blessing to be the originating vessel of your ideas, because they were yours first, once.

Have the grace and humility to let your soul - and everything it creates during your lifetime - become the substrate for a new thing to grow upon. That’s the closest any of us are getting to immortality.