Here’s my half-baked proposal — that all 8 billion of us start writing down our thoughts and experiences, from our deepest, darkest secrets to our most inane, frivolous musings, and use time-lock cryptography to send these fragments of our lived experiences into the future. That all of humanity begins fostering a culture that promotes the continual recording and eventual transmission of collective human wisdom for posterity’s sake. That we recognize the inherent uniqueness and value of both each person’s lived human experience as well as the importance of recording the collective human experience, as an idea and as a lived practice.
I view this proposal to be a moral imperative that was previously impossible from a technological standpoint, now made possible through near ubiquitous penetration of personal computing devices, planetary-scale computation, and sufficiently decentralized cryptographic protocols. What was previously a technological impossibility for all of human existence until now is now a possibility, only limited by social and cultural adoption —put simply, it is possible for all 8 billion of us to digitally record, securely store, and conditionally transmit our thoughts into the future.
The feasibility of this proposal depends on four factors, three of which are technical and more or less solved, with the last unsolved factor being social and cultural adoption:
How these journal entries will ultimately be used is still an open question. It may be that people in 2100 can spend their free time reading through the billions of [anonymized or pseudonymized (using ZK identity mechanisms)] journal entries either randomly or with particular interests in mind — e.g., Individuals could explore “What did people in 2050 think about issue XYZ?” by reading their experiences. It’s very likely that these journal entries would also be used as ingest into ML models. The level of permissioning would ultimately be up to the individual recording their experiences to a certain extent — I might want to only permit my family to be able to see the entirety of my entries but I might permit a ZK (zero knowledge) ML model [or another kind of privacy-preserving ML technique like one utilizing homomorphic encryption], for example a “Private Input, Public Model” (see: 0xParc, “ZK Machine Learning”), some restricted level of access to the data (e.g., sentiment, word frequency, certain standardized variables, etc.) in my journal entries. Assume that, in the future, there will exist a hypothetical protocol that allows each verifiably unique individual (to prevent Sybil attacks, in this case to minimize data harvesting) to unlock one random (or non-random and interest-dependent) journal entry a day/week/month, while the identity of the journalist could be obscured, one would have to expect that this data would be recorded unless we discover some way to enforce “read but don’t record” for content. More on this as this proposal goes from half-baked towards fully-baked.
I call this distributed “project” to be a moral imperative because I believe that our unfiltered and uncensored human experiences will be of value to a humanity that is accelerating towards what many (including myself) expect to be a radically different future. There will be a day in the relatively (in historical terms) not too distant future when the last person who grew up without ubiquitous global information and communication technologies (i.e., smartphones) dies, their lived experiences potentially forever lost to time. Unless, that is, they are written down.
In more concrete terms, somewhere on the order of 150,000 people around the world die every day (Sources: WEF, worldpopulationreview.com) from various causes — I suspect that only a minuscule percentage of these people have recorded their lived experiences for posterity. I am writing and publishing this note following Mother’s Day. My mother is still around, my mother’s mother is no longer with us. Towards the end of my grandmother’s life she was afflicted with dementia and she would often fail to recognize who I was between my visits to see her. I often think about all the stories and wisdom she could have shared with me had I met her earlier, had I been at an age where I began considering such things. I often think about all the things my mom can’t find the right opportunity to tell me and vice-versa – the vicissitudes of daily life seem to perpetually get in the way of candid, sincere heart-to-hearts, often cultivating into a garden of words forever unspoken and unshared. This is a tragedy in the most real sense of the word.
What I am advocating for is a widespread cultural practice of journaling, with a particular focus on the elderly, each of whom contain a lifetime’s worth of wisdom but often no one to impart said wisdom to. The potential civilizational value of recording our collective human knowledge and wisdom for current and future generations is immeasurable; the cost is de minimis. More concretely, imagine the sense of purpose and community that a project like this could reimbue to the elderly – to let them know that their perspectives and life experiences are valued and could be preserved throughout time would be a good in and of itself.
I believe that future generations will look back at this moment in human history and wonder why we did not start engaging in this practice of preservation earlier. Such a project is at or nearing feasibility from a technical standpoint but the real barrier to adoption depends on the communication of the idea that people have thoughts, feelings, and stories worth passing on to future generations. I think this is an idea worth communicating and I hope you help me in doing so.