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Shining a light on the digital dark age

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Re: Shining a light on the digital dark age

#61

Post by _jal »

rolobio wrote: post #28
izzydata wrote: post #18

I think there is something to be said about what is worth archiving. I don't know what it is that should be said though. It seems weird to me that as a society we might be saving things such as a 10 hour video of white noise for another 100 years rather than some personal blogs. What is and isn't worth saving?

It will probably end up being the most popular things, the most viewed or read. More copies of it, more likely to be archived. This reminds me of books. I’m sure the majority of books from over a hundred years ago are lost because they weren’t popular. We haven’t really noticed their absence…

What's interesting there is how many authors of works we consider classics now only become popular well after their deaths.

Kierkegaard, Thoreau, Dickenson and Melville, for instance.

If their works had been lost, "we" probably wouldn't have noticed any of those absences either.

Re: Shining a light on the digital dark age

#62

Post by [deleted] »

bottlepalm wrote: post #42

With AI we have a real chance of 'losing the past' as in we won't be able to tell fact from fiction. The bar to modify images, video, and text form the past will be so low that everyone will do it. And on top of that, coming autonomous agents will do be creating and modifying information at rates we just won't be able to keep up with. I'd say we should sign everything we can now, anything created from 2023 onward is…

[deleted]

Re: Shining a light on the digital dark age

#63

Post by debugnik »

aziaziazi wrote: post #45
rolobio wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It will probably end up being the most popular things, the most viewed or read. More copies of it, more likely to be archived. This reminds me of books. I’m sure the majority of books from over a hundred years ago are lost because they weren’t popular. We haven’t really noticed their absence…

When you publish a book or magazine in France you’re required to give 2 copies to the national library for archive purpose. Doesn't something like that exist in other countries?

It certainly does in Spain. We even extended it to videogames, although I don't know how much that achieves when so many games are barely playable before the first few patches, have much of their content released in future updates and many are unplayable after the servers close.

Re: Shining a light on the digital dark age

#64

Post by alentred »

This reminds me about the "Life After People" television series [1]. In several episodes it presents possible or imagined scenarios in case of a sudden human removal, in various areas: cities, animal life, oceans, etc. Every single bit of modern life requires maintenance. They could have added an episode about the digital information :)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_After_People

Re: Shining a light on the digital dark age

#65

Post by figassis »

nighthawk454 wrote: post #53
bottlepalm wrote: post #42

With AI we have a real chance of 'losing the past' as in we won't be able to tell fact from fiction. The bar to modify images, video, and text form the past will be so low that everyone will do it. And on top of that, coming autonomous agents will do be creating and modifying information at rates we just won't be able to keep up with. I'd say we should sign everything we can now, anything created from 2023 onward is…

is that really any different than the rest of history? maybe blindly trusting recordings is a bubble.

There is a difference. Humanity lies, but until now it could not retroactively mass fabricate truth so convincing that even people current day skeptics had trouble seeing through. When I say current day, I mean in the past, a genocide was being seen as such by at least part of the human population, but than that truth was erased by storytelling. Today, events are fabricated into existence by AI. You go to google to find alternative resources and you can’t trust them either. You can’t verify because it is too costly to verify every single thing you see/hear/read. It’s a problem.

I can imagine a couple million years from now, some alien species shows up, we’re all gone and they think maybe we had wings, some of us were born with blue hair and other were half robots. I get they can study some of our remains, but so much of us is mutable digital info now.

Re: Shining a light on the digital dark age

#70

Post by CuriouslyC »

izzydata wrote: post #18

I think there is something to be said about what is worth archiving. I don't know what it is that should be said though. It seems weird to me that as a society we might be saving things such as a 10 hour video of white noise for another 100 years rather than some personal blogs. What is and isn't worth saving?

AI is going to give a lot of that data that would have otherwise died eternal life. As the tech evolves, businesses will be able to monetize by selling data (for walled gardens) or their pages will all be scraped, cleaned up and resold by multiple orgs (for stuff on the open web).
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