Who Owns Your Context?

Simply put, in VV terms:

We live in the era of rentals. When everything is digital, in the cloud, nothing is truly owned. When was the last time you bought something on a disc? It's all "In Your Library" now — the one owned by Amazon, or Apple, or Steam, or whatever dozen of streaming services you're paying for, where the rights for different media rotate. Lose access to the account, or the streaming service shuts down, and you just had a long rental.

Now, imagine the same for your data. If you're a dinosaur (like me), you might remember MySpace. All those angsty high school posts, DMs, and photos you uploaded only to those albums? They're now lost to the cloud, replaced by a... music service?

How about the latest data breach? Your data, along with that of millions, hit "the dark web" again (whatever that is, exactly, these days), and your passwords and personal data and whatever else are for sale again to whatever malevolent forces want to siphon whatever little currency and energy you have left. Oh well! It happens, and it'll happen again: Big Tech gets a Little Slap and even if there is a class action settlement, it's what — a free year of whatever "Identity Theft Monitoring Service" they're throwing at you next, that's owned by whatever big company, which is (happily, and lucratively — and somehow legally) selling your data to their parent company and partners?

Great.

Thanks.

Let's entertain a thought experiment.

WHAT IF: instead of accepting that your data is fragmented across a million different providers "because that's just the way it is now," you had it centralized on your own machine — with AI assistants from multiple providers tapping into your own personal context for fuller, more informed interactions? That's the larger idea behind Memorandai, and neat open source projects like Yap Core: you should own your own context; if it's in their cloud, it's just a rental.

To be fair, that's not to say that device-local is a perfect solution — realistically, there are no perfect solutions for context storage in the present moment. Your device can die, and without the cloud, backups are on you. Right now the most viable options still route through someone else's yard: Yap Core uses S3 buckets (a little technical, and still Amazon), and Memorandai has no native user-owned cloud solutions (yet). The best I can suggest right now is to sync your context directories to an iCloud folder: this parks your backups in Apple's garden, while your primary context stays home. Steps in a better direction, perhaps, but still far from the ideal destination.

If there are no ideal solutions for local context storage, then context — again, ideally — should be made easier to port and share between applications. That's something I've proposed through a Portable Context Protocol (PCP). However, for a standard like that to truly be effective, support would be required from the titans of industry in AI, and/or widespread use by the masses; two things I do not have at this time.

Regardless, it's a problem worth thinking about, and trying to solve — even more so if you consider what we might be storing twenty years from now.

In "The Singularity is Nearer" futurist Ray Kurzweil predicts that humans will merge with AI in the 2040s — a process that would involve backups of our minds:

"And so merging with superintelligent AI will be a worthy achievement, but it is a means to higher end. Once our brains are backed up on a more advanced digital substrate [...] our lives will not be marred and cut short by the failings of our biology. Finally, humans can be truly responsible for who we are." (Kurzweil, p. 109)

As Kurzweil writes further on, such backups would be tantamount to a digital layer of life extension: "The fourth bridge to radical life extension will be the ability to essentially back up who we are, just as we do routinely with all of our digital information." (Kurzweil, p. 192)

These backups are not without vulnerabilities, however: "Copying our mind files to a remote backup storage system will be a powerful protection against any accident or disease that might damage our brain. This is not 'immortality' any more than Excel spreadsheets uploaded to the cloud are immortal — disasters can still befall the data centers and wipe them out." (Kurzweil, p. 94)

Now, imagine data breaches in that future, with You 3/4/5 wandering the world beyond (Kurzweil even goes so far as to term these "You 2" digital copies "replicants" in a nod to androidian dreams) — but that's a future problem.

I think the answer to that may be in truly user-owned cloud storage. If Memorandai one day resonates with people, and manages to generate revenue, that might provide the resources to begin developing physical cloud-local backups, and start building toward a version of Kurzweil's future where the cloud backups of your digital mind are stored at home — making security, safety, and storage a responsibility that's under your own control.

Granted, that remains a lofty pipedream for now, as I have yet to crack the visibility nut for Memorandai and make a single sale.

Still, check back in ten years: whether this remains a murmur, or crests into a wave, time will be the arbiter of all.