While watching the TV-show Pluribus, one particular idea stayed with me long after the story ended.
The series imagines that the accumulated knowledge of an individual could be transferred into something larger than themselves. In the story, this becomes a collective intelligence. Whether such a future is desirable is another discussion entirely.
What fascinated me was the question behind it: How much of what a person knows disappears when that person dies?
A few months before my mother passed away, we discussed a question that has remained with me ever since:
“How can I dump everything in my head into something external so that it will survive me?”
We were not talking about books or photographs. We were talking about understanding. The memories. The explanations. The reasons behind decisions. The connections between seemingly unrelated events. The answers to questions nobody had yet thought to ask.
Since then I have begun noticing the same pattern everywhere. When my parents died, many possessions remained, but not always the stories that explained why they mattered. In software, source code often survives while the business rationale disappears. Organizations inherit systems but lose the people who understood them.
Perhaps this is not really a software problem. Perhaps it is a human problem. Pluribus imagines one possible answer: preserve everything. Reality is unlikely to offer such a perfect solution.
Yet perhaps we do not need to preserve everything. Perhaps we simply need to become better at preserving the answers to the important questions while the people who know those answers are still able to tell them.
Artificial intelligence may eventually become the interface to that preserved understanding. But it cannot preserve what was never recorded. That responsibility still belongs to us.
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