The digital book of we

What stories would you tell if you were to write an autobiography? It is interesting to think about at times because for the most part, we choose the hardest parts of their lives, the challenges faced and overcome, events and circumstances that shaped us into who we are today. In some way, we use hardship as our qualifier for our position, either as an empowering force or, an excuse as to why we are not further along the path than we had hoped.

For me, I think that I one of my defining forces has been chronic illness when a teen, something that still affects me today. It isn't the illness itself as much as at around eighteen years of age, I had to face the fact that I might not live much longer and, I made my peace with it. This isn't about resignation to succumb, it was the acceptance of my own mortality. This empowered me to live because, I had already fully accepted I would die.

We each have our stories, most of us have several, some of us have many. But, what if someone else was to choose for us, what if there was a different view made. What if something else wrote our biography?

We put so much data online, so much information, photos, posts, chats, comments, our legal and medical records, our school reports, our videos and all of the connected stories that others have written about us, our friends and family and, their private conversations. What if it was collected, sorted, cross-referenced, consolidated, condensed and distilled into the story of our life - what would be the perspective, what would be our story if we ourselves didn't influence the narrative other than through the lives we have led?

If an AI could have unfettered access to our entire digital fingerprint available and all the networks and complexities it contains. It could match timelines to events and stories, make assumptions on behaviors and connect us to the world in ways we could never do ourselves. In many ways, it could provide a much more honest appraisal of our experience than we ourselves could as it doesn't have to protect an ego, it just has to tell the story of a life.

Would it give a clear view, be a compelling read for an audience? Would we be recognizable compared against the walking reality of ourselves. Will the warts be shown, the skeletons in the closet fall from their long held places of hiding on hard disks of forgotten applications? The mismatches of the timeline, the online flirts of the faithful, the lies of who we are and what we are capable of doing; and of course, the photos no one was ever meant to see.

If they were combined into the biography of we and those we know were to read it, would they understand, would they know or, would we appear strangers to those who are closest to us in the walking world? All of the anonymous twitter feeds and trolling matched to lives, connected to real life experiences. Would we like the objective view of ourselves, a feedback loop on the life we have led without the selective memory of self-protection.

It is an interesting thought experiment if we consider the digital lives we lead, much of it unknowingly, most of it spread across a wide range of points with a great deal of diversity and contextual references. For many, the image they hold of themselves might be shattered beyond repair as the view provides information that is verifiable but, never included in the development of the held narrative.

Some might be torn down from their pedestals, some raised from the depth of their misery. Which story would be yours? How closely does the narrative you hold of yourself run to the verifiable and time stamped reality of all of the data points spread across the internet, all of those words, all of those shares?

This process is impossible at this point in time but it doesn't mean that some version of it won't arrive in the not so distant future. For me, I have several million words written on this blockchain alone, 20+ novels of text for an AI to pore over and select, find reference points throughout my life to verify information, comments from others hidden away I have never myself seen. I wonder what story an AI would weave, would I think it is representative of me and, would it be suitable for my daughter to ever read?

I think so but then, what am I forgetting?

Taraz
[ a Steem original ]