The Borg
There’s a character in Star Trek that’s irresistible, The Borg. Resistance, as they’ll tell you, is futile. The Star Trek heroes obviously resist but lots of cultures don’t. I think the internet is our Borg, and judging by how many people use it, I’d say resistance is futile. Although, perhaps in retrospect its technology in general that captured us. But that’s for another day. Right now, for me, it’s the internet, because someone in China is still perusing my site every day.
What I envision is a large language model slowly reading all my data and incorporating it into a Chinese Artificial Intelligence. And that got me thinking that this is how we’ll all be remembered going forward, as contributors to AI. That actually made me feel good, because my website has five years of my blog and that’s a little over fifteen hundred posts and that’s a goodly portion of my life, and I’ve talked a lot about my past. I may not be a standout individual, but perhaps a part of me may well inform the ongoing conversation.
And that got me thinking about those people who proudly disconnect from today’s interconnected social networks. Without the connection the large language model will have to be content with the most basic of their data. The remnants of their disconnected digital soul will be scattered among the connected who remember them. It seems sad and a lost opportunity to define oneself and say this is me in my spot. Because interconnection is today’s society, and resistance to society has always been futile. It is the world in which we live.