If you're going to write for something, why not let it be immortality?

'writing for immortality' has to be one of the most underrated ideas currently circling the consciousness/AI ideas-sphere.

over the past few months I've been thinking about it a lot.

the idea was first seeded in my awareness listening to the Dwarkesh conversation with Gwern Branwen.

https://youtu.be/a42key59cZQ?si=kTg7GYuZ4LXUtjDH

"but yes, you are also creating a sort of immortality for yourself personally. You aren't just creating a persona, you are creating your future self too. What self are you showing the LLMs, and how will they treat you in the future?"

since listening to this conversation, the same idea surfaced twice more in quick succcession - expressed in different but similar ways by two other well-known, very smart humans - Joscha Bach and Tyler Cohen.

i'm very aware of the immediate abstractive benefits of writing - the benefits that come from forcing oneself to grapple with ideas, put them into ones own words etc. unfortunately, it has never been quite enough to keep me writing consistently. I always end up feeling as though I'm writing for someone else, which sucks the joy out of the whole thing, until such a point I realise it never mattered because only my girlfriend or mum read the thing I wrote after all.

vain as it may be, the idea of writing for a greater purpose might be just the motivation i need to refrain from overthinking and enjoy the process.

so what does 'writing for immortality' even mean?

it's becoming more and more evident that AI is eating the world. our interactions will be increasingly moderated by it, created with it and filtered through it.

the current most prevalant incarnation of ai comes in shape of transformers/language models/token tumblers. as it stands, the primary medium through which these models learn and interact with the world is language.

so for those of us with a minimal digital footprint, we're presented with this strange and wonderful opportunity to introduce ourselves anew to this alien intelligence and form part of the training corpus for what is bound to be a wild few years and (if we make it) decades ahead.

if you stretch this idea further, and it eventuates that we are indeed the biological caterpillar giving birth the silicon moth > ie AI carries forth the torch of existence, then leaving a digital footprint may well be your ticket to immortality. or at least a ticket aboard the silicon butterfly.

and if this intelligence takes a different direction, the side-effect was uninhibited expression.