Will AI help to preserve knowledge?

Will AI help to preserve knowledge?

I love being able to look at photos and videos of my children, and I always try to remember that for nearly all of history, that was impossible. If someone was gone (whether passed away or simply out of the room), all you had was your memory, and memories tend to fade. I’m so thankful that we have the tools we do today.

Knowledge is a slightly different beast. We’ve long had books to help preserve knowledge of others, but it can only capture so much. In his book “What’s the Point?“, Tom Rath laments this:

Humanity hemorrhages incalculable value when people who’ve accumulated decades of wisdom, skill, and perspective fail to convert those assets into forms that survive them. Every expert who dies without documenting their knowledge, every leader who exits without developing successors, every innovator who hoards their insights — all represent compound interest that will never be collected.

I think of this with the passing of Charlie Munger a few years ago. He’s one of the most brilliant people who have lived, and that brilliance disappeared with him. We’re fortunate that he left us with “Poor Charlie’s Almanack“, which is amazing, but it’s far less than 1% of his knowledge.

Thanks to a confluence of a few things, I’m hopeful that AI can help make this a little better.

First, we have tools like delphi.ai that allow people to create AI versions of themselves for you to talk to. These are mostly people I’d be unable to actually get in a room with, but I can talk to “them” through this tool.

Second, you have the vast amount of content that people are creating and sharing. Whether it’s mostly text-based (like mine) or tons of video, there are a lot of people with a lot of content. As AI continues to improve, tools like Delphi will have far more content to build from, hopefully making for a much more compelling tool.

Somewhere out there is another “Charlie Munger” that we don’t know about yet, and they’re probably producing a ton of content on a variety of channels. Can you imagine how great a Delphi-like version of Charlie would be if he had grown up in the YouTube era?

I don’t think there will ever be a time when we can literally extract the thoughts from a person and put them into a bot, but AI may get us a lot closer in the coming years.