Live Forever with AI

Welcome to the 42nd entry of my public journal, where I share some of the things I've been exploring across work, tech, wellness, and life.

Oct 31, 2024

Dear Friends,

Two things on my mind today: the intersection of crypto and AI and my grandfather’s memoirs.

Enjoy, and Happy Halloween!

Crypto & AI

With AI creeping into all aspects of life, it’s becoming harder and harder to know what is real and what is fake. (Even the BotOrNot detector on Farcaster thinks the bot Aether is a human.) It’s easy to imagine a society that breaks down because no one can trust what they see online.

Cryptography is the counterbalance.

Cryptography (specifically public/private key cryptography) provides two main benefits: encryption and authentication (see quote below from the book Read Write Own by Chris Dixon which I highly recommend for understanding the foundations of blockchains). When it comes to combating deepfakes and altered images (which existed before AI but are now much easier, cheaper, faster to make and available to anyone anywhere), the ability to authenticate or verify an image or video will be crucial to a functioning society.

Cryptography’s unique ability to authenticate what is real is the best counterbalance we have to AI’s ability to make anything artificial.

Anyway, why is this on my mind this week?

Because I just pre-ordered a camera designed to prevent deep fakes. It has native, built-in cryptographic features that will digitally sign images using cryptography. Anyone will be able to verify an image to determine if it’s been altered or is the true unaltered version that the camera took.

I’m excited to see this develop, and I’ll share more when I start using it.

Roy’s Memoir and using AI to live forever

My grandfather wrote his memoir. He wanted to put his life story down on paper as a gift to his kids, and maybe his grandkids. He did not think his life story was anything spectacular and had no illusion of grandeur that it should be published for anyone else’s interest.

He ended up writing two books. One was his personal life story and one was where he wrote about his time in the Navy during WWII. I read his personal memoir years ago, but I only recently got a copy of his war years book. I started reading it and I’m finding it FASCINATING.

He didn’t see any major battles. In his words, nothing too exciting happened. His life was never seriously threatened. But it’s giving me a glimpse not only into who he was as a person (though so far there are no surprises, turns out I knew him pretty well) but into the time period.

I’m considering publishing his story. With self publishing tools, e-readers, and AI for editing help, it seems like it wouldn’t be too heavy of a lift.

Few related thoughts:

I was chatting with someone this week who was telling me how they are using an AI agent to interview their grandparents. He said we wait too long to ask people about their life story, and sometimes we never get a chance. He doesn’t want to wait until his grandparents are on their deathbed to ask them about their life. He wants to train an AI on their answers, so in the future, his kids can ask it questions. This reminded me of a company a former colleague started to help capture people's stories. But unfortunately, I just googled it and they shut it down. Were they too early? I wonder what they could do with AI today.
If you find this topic interesting, it’s worth watching the Black Mirror episode Be Right Back from a decade ago.
In the world of AI, the more of a digital footprint someone has, the more likely they are to live forever (or at least be remembered for a little bit after they die, even if only by their loved ones). You can write in private like my grandfather or in public like I do. Another example of public writing is Gregarious Narain, who uses a public blog to write letters to his son for his son to read when he gets older.

We launched Farcaster 101, an educational series designed to help brands navigate Farcaster. It’s a 12 part series covering the basics of Farcaster, frames, culture, cryptocurrencies, communities and channels, and strategies for building content. Each week we drop 2 new modules and host office hours open to all. The course is free and we developed it in partnership with Snickerdoodle, a web3 marketing platform.
We had Martin stop by GM Farcaster this week as a special guest to talk about all things Aether, the AI bot he created.
We launched a new podcast under the GM Farcaster Network called The Hub. It’s another Farcaster podcast but this one is developer focused. Host dylsteck.eth will bring different guests on to talk about Farcaster through a developer lens, rehash the developer calls and any other dev related topic. You can watch/listen to episodes on our GM Farcaster channels or you can subscribe to The Hub on its own - just search “The Hub Farcaster” wherever you listen to podcasts. Our vision when we started GM Farcaster was always to create a media network and not just one show, so it’s exciting to be taking small steps towards making that a reality.
We celebrated Purpleversary, the second birthday of Purple, the DAO whose mission is to support and proliferate Farcaster, by bringing on artist and purple founder Chris Carella.
It’s 78 degrees today and it’s October 31.

Some of the pics

Top to bottom, left to right: Hiking with Sky, more hiking with Sky, more Sky. Local efforts to control the invasive Spotted Lanternfly, 24 hour fermented Bulgarian yogurt

A Note to My Readers

I started this substack in December 2022 as an experiment to see if developing a writing habit would help clarify my thinking and/or provide other benefits. You can read about my original intentions in my first post or my more recent reflections after sticking with it for a year.

I write about twice a month and share musings, meditations, and links to things I’m finding interesting as I build out a farcaster-native media company, a modern technology consulting company, raise my kids, and have fun creating and learning in the worlds of crypto, tech, finance, science and wellness.

Thank you for supporting my writing and journey. If you’d like to get in touch you can reply to me here or find me on X and farcaster.

Until next time, keep putting good into the world. —adrienne🌏❤️

Some of the Things

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