A realistic vision

Over the weekend, I received a question from a new contact via discord. This was the image which triggered that query.

Some explanation. This is a graph of my vault in Obsidian, a note taking application. The basic elements of this application is all notes are in markdown which is basically an open text format that has some built in symbology for formatting the text as you write it. Long-short, this means that you can create links between notes using some special symbols that are defined in the markdown protocol. The image above is a picture which shows a graph of all the connections between notes in my vault [NOTE: vault is the name for the directory which all the notes and folders are saved in].

The Question

It was one of those questions where it was sort of obvious that the actual question was something my new contact could not actually ask, for whatever reason. But basically I boiled it do to, how do you do that, and how did you learn to do that?

And My response…

geez. that is a huge question. gimme a moment to collect my thoughts because I want to give you something worth reading…

…which was completely true. So after I considered it for a moment I wrote the following:

I don’t know what ‘best practices’ there are except for what works for you. You could read and study any sort of course work in Information Theory, Number Theory, or Taxonomy and find several contradictory practical applications. Because my vault is so large, I’ve had to implement a couple of major axes of hierarchy. Naturally there is the file system which is systemic to computers. Nested folders inside of nested folders. Etc Then I keep a chronological axis of Daily Notes -> Weekly Notes -> Quarterly and on up. This is where I do my interactions with the vault. Finally, there are a couple of contextual axes of organization. These are mostly framed around content. All these axis serve as graph points or nodes which use links to organize them based upon where they reside in my universe.

Which brings me to the observation, if we are building a “Second Brain” which is a reflection of what we carry in our skull, then what we have to acknowledge is that we are building a fractal based map which has the same level of complexity no matter how close or far away we zoom. Thus my reference to ‘my universe’ is specifically with the understanding that the neurological and physiological elements of our wetware brains are fractal maps of the universe we live in.

A Bit Heady and Verbose

However, today as I was preparing to write this post, I was going to start reflecting on the 30 years of Morning Pages I have written in bound journal books. I was going to dive into the whole axial hierarchy of planners and calendars as templates waiting to be filled and the way that they are linked together gives structure to the data. I was going to ramble on about how I have moved my practice from the handwritten to the digital note so that I could more deeply analysis it and turn it into an action plan, when I was filling out the Standout Questions section of my results and came across this question.

What balance between authentic voice and AI-enhanced communication would best serve the corporation's public image?

In my tracks, I stopped

Of course, I know the straight shooting answer, that is laced with some cynical and conservatively informed (note small case 'c') approach to technology, is that there should be no balance, it should all be human based communications. But this is impossible for several reasons.

The First of which is that Eckenrode Muziekopname, despite having a DBA for this name, is a fictional entity-corporations are not people. The 'staff' of this might transnational media conglomerate are all fictional people, so when you read something on this page that does not have my name attached to the authorship, it is heavily edited by one of numerous AI Agents that I have at my fingertips. Yup. It is my ideas, my conception, but sometimes the words I select are not the best, so I have some help. Sure you can probably pick it out, but that's ok.

The Second of which, and this is why it is not a terrible selection for me to make, the way I am employing AI Agents within my vault is that I am encouraging their hallucinations as nearly everything in my vault is intentionally fantasy, science fiction, and made up. There is a massive amount of data in my vault which supports the paperwork for and entire planet of locations, characters, and political intrigue. And this planet is set in an entirely different universe. This is part of what I was referring to as the contextual axes of organization. That big beautiful blue, yellow and green arc on the top half of the graph image, that is all geographic data, notes for each little burg, town, or city on the planet, as well as all the points of interest that are in rural or remote settings.

The Third Reason why avoiding incorporating AI into public facing communications such as this is impossible, trend lines. Yes, we are in the beginning stages of the AI Bubble. Everything is AI this, AI that; OpenAi just released its new upcoming model which is better at reasoning and coding but doesn't have the same personality that people have come to be dependent upon for their interactions as the previous model. Massive amounts of money are flowing into this particular tech sector, just like massive amounts of money have flowed into other tech sectors: Social Media, Website, Y2K, Spreadsheets, Personal Computers, on and on.

In short, this is the pattern. We throw too much money at the new toys, develop the hell out of them, and then the bubble pops but what remains is that we have this new tech. the Dot-com bubble bursting did not stop websites from being profitable businesses-they are now the business leaders, go ahead name them. We are still getting new social media platforms as we grow more dissatisfied with the way the social media giants have stagnated in favor of earning money for their stakeholders. So AI is having its bright shiny moment. But not knowing how to use it, whether or not the bubble burst today or in three years, it will be around afterwards. And it won't even be a big deal any more.

Sure sure, some Conservative knitwit will bellyache about whatever it is that they bellyache about and lame it on AI, because they don't understand it. There will also be some Liberal bellyaching about it because, whatever reason. It is a tool, just like a saw, a hammer, and a rope. What you do with that tool is the important thing.

So today's post, by me, will be the stream of consciousness ramblings that I have historically put out onto blogs and websites for the life of them. But there will be other posts which tackle different angles of the knowledge vault that I have accumulated, generated, created, curated, and put together, that use the perspectives that an AI Agent can give me, and you.