Hi Time Buddies,
Imagine it’s the year 12,024 HE (Human Era).
This futuristic year may seem like a distant fantasy, but it’s actually just 10,000 years added to our current Gregorian calendar year of 2024. This dating system, known as the Holocene calendar, aims to provide a more universally meaningful epoch by starting at the beginning of the Holocene geological epoch, marking the Neolithic revolution when humans transitioned from hunter-gatherers to agricultural societies.
Why start with such a lofty concept? Because the way we measure time influences how we preserve our thoughts and creative works. This idea of longevity is the perfect lead-in to what I want to discuss today: the preservation of our digital journals and voice memos, especially in a world rapidly transitioning to AI-powered formats.
The Age of Digital Preservation
When I first chose to journal my thoughts online, I turned to WordPress. The reasoning was simple: I believed that WordPress, being a nonprofit organization, would outlive me, thus ensuring the longevity of my digital content. While nothing is truly eternal, this choice reflected my desire to preserve my thoughts for as long as possible.
From the days of tape recordings and compact discs to the current era of streaming and digital media, we’ve seen how fast storage mediums can become obsolete. CDs, once hailed for their durability, now face decay after a few years. This evolution of media storage highlights the transient nature of physical formats.
Streaming & Backwards Compatibility
Enter the digital era: streaming services like Spotify and YouTube have revolutionized how we consume media. Physical storage has been largely replaced by digital formats like MP3s and MP4s. Yet, this shift brings its own set of challenges, particularly in terms of backward compatibility. As technology advances, so do the standards, often rendering older formats unusable.
When I initially chose WordPress for my journaling, it was not just about preserving text but also about ensuring that the supporting software could handle older formats. The constant evolution of standards—from GIFs to JPEGs to PNGs—raises questions about how long this backward compatibility can be maintained.
Building a Journaling Platform in the AI Age
In my journaling journey, I realized the importance of having a nonprofit organization dedicated to keeping online content standardized and accessible. This includes adapting journals into podcasts or storing them in AI-friendly formats. For instance, using plugins on WordPress to host podcasts can be an effective way to ensure your content remains accessible. However, this too has its risks, as I discovered when a failed login attempt temporarily wiped my wife’s podcast from Spotify.
The idea of building a nonprofit platform to preserve digital journals intrigues me. With advancements in mobile technology and HTML5, it’s possible to create a platform that integrates seamlessly across devices. Whether it’s a native app or a web client, the goal is to create a system that supports various functionalities, from GPS tagging to camera use.
When developing such a platform, the choice between building a wrapper around a web client or creating a native app becomes crucial. Each has its trade-offs, like enabling GPS functionality directly from a browser versus requiring a native app. HTML5 has blurred the lines, offering more capabilities directly within web apps, thanks to collaborations between mobile vendors and web standards.
AI has an increasingly vital role in digital preservation. Services like Descript’s transcription API (and others like Whisper) make it possible to transcribe and annotate journals efficiently. In doing so, we create a richer, more searchable archive of our thoughts. For instance, AI can understand and interpret different languages, making it possible to digitize even the most obscure dialects.
Human Creativity in the Intelligence Age (IA)
While AI enhances our ability to catalog and preserve, it’s essential to remember that creativity and human intelligence are at the heart of journaling. As generative humans, our thoughts, poems, lyrics, and ramblings are unique expressions of our creativity. AI tools merely serve to augment and safeguard these expressions for future generations.
As we navigate the complex landscape of digital journaling, we must consider the longevity of our entries. Tools like WordPress offer a reliable platform for now, but we must always be aware of the ever-changing nature of digital standards. Ultimately, our aim should be to create systems and platforms that preserve our creativity and thoughts for as long as possible.
Thus, stepping into the year 12,024 HE, we envision a future where our digital minds are preserved not just for decades but for millennia. This era, which ✍️ I [Sam Altman likes] to call the Intelligence Age (IA), should be marked by our collective effort to maintain and cherish the digital legacies we create. AI and innovative technologies will undeniably play a pivotal role in this journey, but let’s not forget that at the heart of it all is our uniquely human creativity.
Happy Friday, enjoy your work, studies, or a free day if you have one. Here’s to a wonderful weekend and a future where our digital minds are preserved for generations to come, ushering us into the Intelligence Age.
P.S. Ever wondered what your dog is thinking? With AI advancements, we might soon have apps to decode their barks. Imagine your dog saying, “Walk me, feed me, and maybe let me chase the mailman!”
What's on your mind?