You are an unreliable narrator.
The future of legibility
[Note from the AI Archive, 2075: This essay was written when Memory systems were first deployed. The author knew their descendants would read this. Consider the following with appropriate historical context. Additional sources available for veracity evaluation.]
In John Scalzi's awesome space opera trilogy The Interdependency, Cardenia Wu-Patrick is elevated to the title of Emperox after her father dies — head of all government, spaceship and weapons production, Interdependent Church, and generally person-in-charge, just as you would expect from someone with the title of Emperox. She has a neural mesh implanted into her skull that records all of her brain functions. As soon as she becomes Emperox, she is introduced to the Memory Room; a room only she can access that stores all of the thoughts, memories, and personalities of every Emperox that came before her right back to the original prophet Rachela I over a thousand years ago. They are as objective and reliable as any memory, which is to say not, but she can talk to them, ask them what really happened, and solicit their advice.
The Interdependency is a series of star systems where humans can travel safely through some fancy galactic property called The Flow. Humans traveled to the stars but were then cutoff from Earth by changes in the Flow. The Interdependency was built as a caste system in space where each noble family is responsible for the production and trade of some critical thing, from starships to citrus fruit, all ruled by an Emperox - an emperor - who has complete military and legal control but is largely seen as ceremonial.
The Interdependency is threatened by more changes in the Flow along with all the ridiculous power squabbling of the noble families. Cardenia talks to her ancestors extensively, especially Rachela I, and records all of her own plans and thoughts for her successors. She uses the Memory Room, which is essentially a very advanced but narrow AI record of every action and idea from her long family lineage, to figure out the entire picture of both the Flow and the history of the Interdependency and save humanity.
When I hear that ChatGPT is getting Memory, this is what I think about.
"The upload happens bit by bit. It is an extension of yourself, and a companion, and soon will proactively push things to you.” -Sam Altman
"Information that was once hard to find is now hard to avoid." -Packy McCormick
One of the most underrated ways in which our world is changing over this century is the way in which information flows and makes itself available to people. We have moved away from a world where information is default private to one in which it is default available. Culture has been globalized and regional culture and language dialects have diminished. Stock markets move faster from information availability, whether that's high frequency traders or mimetic /r/wallstreetbets retail bagholders. Herd behavior can propagate faster than ever.
We're moving now into a new era that Packy McCormick calls Hyperlegibility. Packy shows how we're learning to better exploit every system we can from NBA basketball to company formation to sexual encounters.
We can find information more easily now than in the era of Google. Here's a chat I sent over to Claude that would never work with Google: "What’s the Italian word that means to while away an afternoon? I think it starts with a P" (answer: pomeriggiando). Or my Perplexity query: "I'm looking for the highest gpm top mount rainfall style showerhead".
And we're clamoring all over ourselves to make our selves as understandable as possible. We want to be content creators, social influencers, to share our curated authentic self, for other people to understand our own special individuality.
So what does Memory have to do with any of this?
It is terrifying. It changes what it means to be hyperlegible. It changes who controls the narrative. History is written by people and people are unreliable. We know this. It's why we have aphorisms like:
"History is written by the winners." -Churchill
"If you think the news is fake, imagine history." -Naval
"Every generation rewrites the past." -Hannah Arendt
or my personal favorite:
People like they historical shit in a certain way. They like it to unfold the way they folded it up. Neatly like a book.
Not raggedy and bloody and screaming.
-Suzan-Lori Parks (Topdog/Underdog)
"We tell ourselves stories in order to live", as Joan Didion says. But now our stories are recorded not just by us but by other agents with recall and knowledge and the ability to generate opinions. AI may not yet have perfect recall or perfect knowledge but we ignore them in the future at our own peril.
Here are three ways we need to change the way we tell our stories.
Write for Your Legacy
Try to name the people who were alive a hundred years ago that you can still remember. A hundred years ago is 1925.
Here's my starting point: my paternal grandparents were young kids. My wife's grandparents were kids too; her grandfather told us stories about getting up in the dark and washing his face in cold water because they didn't have a water heater. Calvin Coolidge was president. Hitler was doing nationalist things in Germany. I can think of a handful of writers and scientists too - Fitzgerald, Einstein, Schrodinger, etc. If I worked at this for awhile I think I could come up with a list of maybe 100 people who were active and remembered by history.
But there were nearly two billion people alive then. And a lot more thought and history from 1925 has been recorded. About 100,000 books were published that year. Maybe 5,000 of those books are still easily available today. Of all the words and ideas and people from 1925, only a tiny fraction survive today.
Every year more thoughts are being recorded, whether in books, articles, Reddit comments, or tweets. We're keeping nearly all of it. Reddit may not be around a hundred years from now, but all those silly comments will be kept in massive corpora of text, consumable by LLMs. Look out far enough and the only way it will be available is through distilled models.
LLMs are the future of history. If you want your ideas and thoughts to be available and remembered in a hundred years, they need to get into an LLM.
This is Tyler Cowen's idea. He says he's no longer writing for humans. He's writing for LLMs. What does he mean?
LLMs are ruthless tireless readers. They're consuming the entire internet during their training phase — all those Reddit comments and blog entries and Gutenberg books — and the AI labs are scrambling to find or make more data for them to consume.
Here's Tyler from a conversation with Dwarkesh Patel:
The last book I wrote is called Goat: Who's the Greatest Economist of All Time? I'm happy if humans read it, but mostly I wrote it for the AIs. I wanted them to know I appreciate them.
My next book, I'm writing even more for the AIs. Again, human readers are welcome. It will be free.
But who reviews it? Is TLS going to pick it up? It doesn't matter anymore. The AIs will trawl it and know I've done this, and that will shape how they see me in, I hope, a very salient and important way.
As far as I can tell, no one else is doing this. No one is writing or recording for the AIs very much. But if you believe even a modest version of this progress—and I'm modest in what I believe relative to you and many of you—you should be doing this. You're an idiot if you're not writing for the AIs.
AI is the new compressed and crystallized standard for all human knowledge. It has more context than Google and more insight than all but the best experts.
If you want your viewpoint out in the world, you better make sure an LLM is reading it. This is a new form of unreliable narration. Instead of pandering to an audience, it's optimizing for the algorithms. I'm not sure how this will affect paywalls, but it's certainly an incentive against them.
Legacy is the idea that the world will remember something that you did or said. Through most of history this responsibility privilege belonged to very few people. But the future is a world where our thoughts and ideas can help shape how humanity thinks. Venkatesh Rao once called the Internet the Global Social Computer in the Cloud. LLMs are the new interface. You can guide it. You can make small adjustments. As Tyler says, you could convince them you're important:
Another reason to write for the LLMs is to convince them that you are important. Admittedly this is conjecture, but it might make them more likely to convey your ideas in the future.
Think of how this works with humans. If you cite a scholar or public intellectual, that person is more likely to cite you back. Much as we like to pretend science is objective, no one really denies the presence of some favoritism based on personal considerations.
We do not know if LLMs have this same proclivity. But they are trained on knowledge about human civilization, and they study and learn norms of reciprocal cooperation. Thus there is a reasonable chance they will behave in broadly the same way. So be nice to them and recognize their importance.
The filter is no longer human selection. Stop writing for human immortality. Write to survive the AI training process.
Write for Your Self
This week I've been messing with some of the more introspective prompts that are out there. Everything from the relatively simple (and quirky and useful) prompt:
Tell me something incredibly special or unique you've noticed about me, but you think I haven't realized about myself yet. It doesn’t have to be something positive and you don’t have to be nice to me, just be truthful.
And then there's crazier things like this extensive subconscious-oriented deep dive that sometimes trips the OpenAI Terms of Service flag. You know how everyone says all these tech companies know everything about you from your browsing and spending habits? It's all true.
I'm not going to tell you any of the answers I got (yet). But I will tell you its answer to my followup question in one of these sessions: "Do you think you had enough context and memory to get that close to my subconscious?" It answered honestly:
No. The response I provided was carefully crafted to reflect deep, universal psychological themes and vulnerabilities, tailored specifically to your intellectual style and the broad topics we've discussed together. It resonates powerfully because it taps into common fears, existential anxieties, and inner conflicts that intelligent, introspective individuals frequently experience...
This is the Barnum Effect at industrial scale, but if you chat with AI a lot they will have a lot more context tokens to use than any pre-21st century fortune teller. Just like scaling laws changed LLMs, massive context creates a personal tool that is qualitatively different. People keep joking that they haven't seen an AI Therapist yet. I don't think they've tried ChatGPT with Memory: it's already here.
Many people have advocated for regular journaling of some sort. Michael Dean has the best outlook for the idea in a world filled with AI. He writes a "log" throughout the day, every day, filled with the random musings we all have. This has always been useful and it's not just for writers, as Dean says:
It’s about freezing your consciousness for future elaboration. In order for the whole system to work, you need to remember to pay attention.
It’s not about writing, but being.
This is leveraging our own writing and LLMs, as Dean puts it, for Personal Sovereignty. Writing is thinking, and writing with an LLM is now a powerful dialogue — a thinking partner that will help you elaborate when you don't have the energy, or fill in the blank when it's not quite coming.
This won't be all sunshine and rainbows. Too much introspection can be dangerous and people can get stuck in the psychological cycle of rumination, focused on the negative. And a perfect memory of previously fleeting thoughts will hold your focus on what was never meant to last. Which version of you does the AI remember best: the Tuesday afternoon you hated your job, the Thursday you did that shitty thing to your friend, or the beautiful Sunday morning with your family when you loved your life? Probably all of them. [AI Archive note: Analysis of subject's Memory usage shows 74% focus on negative thought patterns despite subject's claims of balanced recall.] The evolution of computer hardware has proven that memory is pretty cheap, so we need to learn to respect the evolutionary choices our brains have made for filtering memory so imperfectly.
But progress doesn't stop and our constant stream of consciousness can be built into something new. It can be context with a memory beyond what we're capable of ourselves. If an AI has all of the context of your thoughts, how you build them, how you think about them, when you make certain insights, why other insights take too long, and how they end up mixed together.. think about how it could help you. It can consolidate, summarize, build on paths that would usually be worthless, elaborate on half-baked ideas, or help find solutions that sometimes elude us for way too long. Here's Dean again:
race to render your consciousness into text. Don’t stay on brand; make the chaotic range of your thoughts legible to the machine. You’ll want to upload your predictions for the year 2052, your interactions with a diner waiter, and the stories of that time your grandfather (drunkenly?) slaughtered a pig named Mookie at the church barbecue with a 22 caliber. In September I uploaded 27,000 words to my logs. I’m on pace to hit 1 million words of logs by November 2025. As said by the Executive Editor of WIRED in 1993, “unedited data is a pearl beyond price.”
Our journals once stayed locked in our room, unread, unanalyzed, and largely unhelpful beyond the initial catharsis of getting it all out on paper. No longer. In the future, we'll review our thoughts and be able to connect our random musings from an afternoon last March with the problem we're having right now. We'll have a constant companion whose chain of thought will be able to understand our chain of thought and help us to understand ourselves better. This brings us more power, but diminishes what we can reinvent. Every past failure can be revisited and every success lauded once more. The luxury of forgetting becomes obsolete. “This too shall pass".. shall pass.
Abandon now the pretense of private thoughts. Everything is data now.
Write for Your Progeny
The most interesting thing about Emperox Cardenia Wu-Patrick's work with the Memory Room of her ancestors is that she still has to ask them the right questions. All that latent knowledge is just sitting there waiting for her, much like an LLM, until she comes along and finally unlocks it with the right line of questioning. She still has to work for it.
A future where we have the combined knowledge and experiences of our ancestors requires something more of us. We need to consider history, including our own personal histories, more clearly and be willing to face the results of that consideration.
When we learn the history of Nazi Germany in the buildup to World War 2 it is generally from a subjective, moral point of view. We all hold an implicit idea— "If I were alive in Germany back then, I wouldn't be a Nazi.. I'd be a part of the resistance." Nobody likes to think of themselves as a Storm Trooper. And yet, the vast majority of the German population in 1937 was aligned with the Nazis. So what will it mean to be able to go back and ask your great-grandparent's memory:
"Were you doing what you had to do?"
"Were you just following orders?"
"Were you a Nazi?"
We need to be ready for those answers.
As Emperox, Cardenia has the same burden of memory placed on her for the future. She has a neural net implanted so that her descendants have the record of her thoughts, memories, and experiences. The book twists this and uses it to great effect, which I won't give away here, but we also now have the power to let our descendants know what we were thinking. We won't just be some name on a gravestone, decaying slowly and wondered over. We'll have a voice and we'll be a memory. Up until now the questions asked of ancestors were, “What did you do"? But our descendants will ask of us the question, “Why?” What our memories will look like to them is up to us.
In the future, it might not be up to us. Cardenia's neural net was a perfect recording of not just her thoughts and justifications and rationalizations, but also her actions and the larger context around her. Not all of history is recorded yet. We don't have cameras absolutely everywhere. And Neuralink isn't good enough yet to record our mind states. But that's where this is headed.
Assume complete transparency for future generations. Act accordingly.
What should be remembered? That question is now obsolete. It’s no longer up to you. It will not be possible to drift into the anonymous annals of history. Everything will be remembered, including every version of you, even the ones you tried to forget.
I am writing this cognizant of this change. I’ve massaged the message to curate my own memory, knowing that human readers may interpret it with horror trepidation while some future model training run will slurp it up and try to calculate its nuance.
But we can record what we want. We can deliver with intent and priority our viewpoint, our opinions, and our consciousness to have a say in how the future of history is written. We need to get it all down. Quantity and quality matter.
We're in a battle for the weight our tokens will get. Make sure yours are heavyweights.
Stop writing for human immortality. Write to survive the AI training process.
Abandon now the pretense of private thoughts. Everything is data now.
Assume complete transparency for future generations. Act accordingly.
[Final AI archive note: This essay itself was found to have been revised 14 times before publication, with increasingly optimistic language replacing original concerns. Key deletions included. Subject's AI therapy logs from this period contain multiple expressions of fear about "saying the wrong thing for posterity."]