Years later, suddenly

Well. Given that the last thing I wrote was something about the blogs of yore being a system of posts slowly evolving towards a set state on the theme "I'm still here" and "More stuff soon"… I assume it is just fitting that it is suddenly a bit more than three years since I wrote "more soon". And that this post goes up long after I drafted it.

Too much happening for me to start expressing what has been going on. A lot of things – some joyous, others sad.

Professional update: I joined the faculty at Aalto University a couple of years ago. Doing a lot of teaching and really liking it. Supervising and advising students. I wrote some things about that. More things that would be nice to clean up and put here.

I returned to these dusty pages because one of the fixtures in my orgmode TODO list (one that has been on my it for so many years that I now don't even notice it any more) is to upload the almost-ready-essay called Robots and Rights here. (I mentioned it in my I'm still alive post 3 years ago). I think I started that one before the pandemic, and revisiting it now I realise that, perhaps the world has passed it by. The topic was about how to think about agency and responsibility for those bots and robots that I back then assumed soon would join us online and in the physical world.

What I wrote there was that perhaps investigating how we have traditionally extended and debated agency for service animals might offer a clue. Today, when the dominant interface with these is to a high degree natural language, which perhaps makes us more prone to assign intentionally and reasoning, I suspect that argument will need some more work. (Although, there is still no common way to consider how AI agents are held responsible other than through humans, so perhaps something can be said about the accountability that have historically reserved for members of society.)

Anyway, thinking about that I then recalled three short story drafts I wrote back in 2010–2011. At the time, I was taking some creative writing classes and while I focused on non-fiction, I decided to try my hand at fiction too. I never finished those stories. One was about capturing a personality for a digital afterlife … but that you still had to die. Nothing noteworthy, nothing novel. (That one got worked into two other drafts if I recall: one about some personalities lacking a halting conditions and thus messing up the afterlife, and another, better, one about a kind of inverse handicap in augmented realities.) Reading Greg Egan years later, I realized how it should have been done.

However, it is the two other drafts I now wish I could locate, just because they were near future, but now already passé, I'd guess. One, I think, dealt with meme factories. Of course the idea that it would take a generation to get there… well. Never mind.

I can't recall if the other text had a title beyond "Last post" (?), It was about the last day at work for a human person hired to post on a social media network (think twitter, back in those days) in order to keep it from deteriorating. Nobody cares about having humans posting any more and gradually everyone has gotten bots to post for them, but something is missing and the system isn't stable, which is why a few have to be paid to post. To me this was how the little social media I saw felt like back then as well. The basis was that persons bring impressions from outside the system that helps to keep it 'alive'.

Long story short, while looking for them I recalled this little corner of the internet.

Anyway, it does feel like the best before date might have expired on those drafts. I'd still like to find the notebook however to see how much I recall and how much is after-construction. These days when people launches social media sites especially for bots, and the agents are something completely different from what I imagined it would be fun to find it again.

All that about things that are not done. But the site has a bit new CSS (that I apparently added at some point) and a better orgmode build system under the hood.