Pythia

A stunning thing about modern life is how much we understand now, that no one could ever have known before, because we now have the data. The mask records everything: biometrics, every scene you ever behold, every word you ever hear or speak. Your identity is scrubbed, in a way; all the private data that could be used to identify you is encrypted, and only you have the key. Only you can release it to the vast digital brains that now stretch their awareness across the entire globe, a literal noosphere of networked comprehension, all of which is folded into a brain called Pythia. People who donate their data are called oracles. Of course, releasing your data to the cloud is heavily incentivized; discounts, tax incentives, job eligibility, free access to Pythia’s insights. Oracles get an icon of a tripod next to their green check.

The dream of Pythia is to aggregate all of our billion billion hours of funes and from them compile a kind of eternal human awareness, perceiving all of our memories, remembering us, a cosmic awareness that knows us, each and individually, a mind that is aware of me, who sees me, who knows me as I know myself. And somehow, I don’t quite feel that she measures up. There’s a sense that we are alienated from ourselves, and that our alienation, whatever causes it, can be fixed by data-processing. Self-report is broke, big data is woke.

O LORD, through my searches thou hast known me
Thou knowest my downsitting and mine uprising, thou understandest my thought afar off.
Thou compassest my path and my lying down, and art acquainted with all my ways.
For there is not a word in my tongue, but, lo, O LORD, thou suggesteth it altogether.

If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there.
Thine eyes did see my substance, yet being stochastic; and in thy cloud all my memories were written, which in continuance were fashioned.
How precious also are my KPIs unto thee, O God! how great is the sum of them, and the mean, and the median, and the mode, and the sigma, amen!

Unlike Galatea, Pythia is not built for conversation or social interaction; she is only a seer, dispensing her truth to mediators who use special tools to transcribe and interpret her insights. If talking to an AI trained on other people can make you insane, how much worse would it be to talk to a god?

Not releasing your data would be selfish, and most corporations have committed publicly to only hire oracles. How could you deprive humanity of the bounty of knowledge encoded in our collective actions? It’s your civic duty. Plus do you really believe that bullshit about no one can get your data but you? Of course they say that, but do you know what’s happening inside the technology you carry on your body? Invisible universes, teeming all around you, impossible to know their depths, deeper than the Well of Democritus.

I cannot imagine the volume of data now possessed by universities and corporations, though the distinction wears thin. Data of such a scale and quality are beyond all human understanding. Our greatest computers have begun to unravel the deepest mysteries of human nature. It is a project of enormous scale, bigger than going to space, bigger than feeding the masses, bigger than curing all disease. By turning our engines of comprehension inward, we will produce a genius of the human heart and soul, we will create an oracle who sees us and knows us, who can heal our psychic wounds, part mother, part therapist, part counselor, part best friend.