Future Posthumous Autobiography
sivers.orgOne of the interesting side effects of Microsoft buying GitHub is whatever we leave behind might just sit there for centuries or even millennia for historians and the curious and AI to explore. We kind of have this opportunity to make our own time capsules and maybe in a thousand years some enthusiast is like, wow I got this ancient project to compile!
Way back in the 90s, when everything was still in sepia, I thought all the Geocities and Angelfire personal websites would be doing this exact thing. Hanging around as a time capsule in perpetuity, accessible by future generations as easily as the current. It turns out eternity is approximately 10 years by this measure. Maybe Github will fare better.
I can use this.
I make prophecies. I write them down and seal them in envelopes, then I wait. When one is proven false, I just throw it away. When it comes true, I put the still-sealed envelope into an old shoebox.
My posthumous autobiography is going to be filled to the brim with stories of receiving messages from beyond, writing down what the voices say, and putting the notes in sealed envelopes inside a shoebox.
How will you prove that you'd written the prophesy before the thing happened, instead of just immediately before putting it in the shoebox?
Wouldn't it be easier to just write down things that happened already and pretend you predicted them?
With the scheme given, it's no challenge to prove that you wrote it down.
Write down every possible winner of the 2020 Presidential election in an envelope. Include people who are still massively long-shot candidates and not even running right now, like Oprah Winfrey and Michelle Obama. Provide whatever proof you like that you wrote these down today. Throw away everything that doesn't fit in another year and a few months. Boom, you're psychic. Especially if one of those long shots pans out!
This scheme generates the proof that you wrote it down early, unlike the "claim prophecy after the fact".
> Provide whatever proof you like that you wrote these down today... This scheme generates the proof that you wrote it down early
But what proof is there? Newspaper clippings from today's news in the envelope? That's hardly conclusive proof it was written on that day.
One solution would be to encode the prophecy into a blockchain, and reference that in the envelope. This way there's multiple witnesses that you did something that day at least.
I've heard that people have done this with twitter accounts; make a new account that's private, tweet random stuff. Once one of them comes true, say, "bart simpson becomes president in 2020", delete all your other tweets, rename the account to something like "bartsimpson2020", and then publicize the account.
You now have a timestamped thing from before it happens that verifies you made the claim long ago, but you've destroyed the evidence that it was effectively random.
"One solution would be to encode the prophecy into a blockchain, and reference that in the envelope. This way there's multiple witnesses that you did something that day at least."
That's the basic scheme. Variants on this idea have been in use for centuries. Modern hash schemes, including those used in the blockchains, make it trivial, albeit at the price of byte-for-byte precision; you just have to provide reasonable evidence that something existed at some point in time, which is easy with twitter, facebook, google, and literally thousands of other places you can stick arbitrary content that will end up with a timestamp that you can reasonably claim you have no ability to forge.
Mail it to yourself.. You'll get a postmark with a date/time it was processed. Don't open the envelope once it arrives, and now you've got proof of when you mailed it.
I remember people suggesting this as a poor man's "copyright" on an email list back in the day.
Others quickly pointed out that you can mail yourself an unsealed envelope and put something in it after it arrives.
Pardon me while I apply palm to forehead with middling force.
This is the little detail my dumb joke missed.
You need to consider what steps will be taken to eliminate fakes - at some point immense processing power, massive storage, massive memory, and AI will make a local dataset out of all the comments on all the websites and the grandparent might be automatically filtered out specifically for this conversation...
Why is someone posting this garbage?