Considering the proliferation of AI-generated slop, as well as the lines between satire and reality being blurred, I wonder if future historians will have a harder time understanding what was really going on.
Considering the proliferation of AI-generated slop, as well as the lines between satire and reality being blurred, I wonder if future historians will have a harder time understanding what was really going on.
A “dark age” is really just one where records didn’t survive, not that it was particularly bad. This usually follows a breakdown of power structures but the real loss is that we can’t know what happened.
I’m worried that transitioning so much to fragile digital technology could result in massive amounts of knowledge and culture being inaccessible, like that guy’s hard drive full of Bitcoin.
And it’s not just all of society that will be lost, but family history as well. Photographs and letters survive a long, long time. But without strict preservation and keeping old formats alive my grandkids won’t be able to flip through old photos of my family like I can with an old photo album.
Well, with the amount they are attempting to rewrite, if Archive.org goes down, the dark ages shall begin.
We could lose 99.9% of digital records and what’s left would still be far more than the amount of surviving records from any other point in history.