Discover more from Matt Rickard
I just finished the Musk biography by Isaacson. It was a good read with original reporting that I had never read before. Musk is a complicated figure.
But there aren’t enough Isaacsons to write everyone’s story. Writing a biography is an interesting task — analyze and synthesize all the facts of a life and turn them into narrative form. Making sense of the twists and turns of a life (maybe your own).
You'd give the AI access to your writing, photos, documents, and other data sources. We already do this on a small scale — Apple creates Photo Moments, which isn’t half bad. We already have chatbots that can simulate the voice and personality of historical figures (some better than others).
Imagine the AI’s job was to describe you – who you are, what you did, what your personality was like. The AI could write and create accompanying content for a biography of your life. It might even run the generated text through a model trained on your voice.
AI Biographers
literally the plot to Transcedence (2014) with Johnny Depp except
<spoiler alert>he becomes a megaorganism with the AI and cures pollution via nanotech
</spoiler alert>
This is kind of why I've leaned into hoarding my past data: I think it'll become useful one day, if nothing else as a snapshot of what I was doing during that moment in my life. I bet there are lessons to be learned and tons to extrapolate.