> how much does knowing Great-great Aunt Ethyll’s thoughts on Karl Marx actually affect us on a daily basis? How much will your predilection for the song stylin

> how much does knowing Great-great Aunt Ethyll’s thoughts on Karl Marx actually affect us on a daily basis? How much will your predilection for the song stylings of Kim Kardashian affect future generations in a meaningful way? I'd expect a lot in both cases. The first is part of ongoing conversations in society. The second, well... An AI historian or at the very least an AI-assisted historian will likely be the one reading it all, and it'll be extremely interested to get the precise pulse of what went on in people's minds in our day and time. Contrast this with, say, 200 years ago. We have diaries, letters, newspapers, pamphlets, books, etc. But the data is spotty, and won't allow you to comb through what went on in a typical person's mind. Data from Facebook, Google, Amazon, and so forth allows to do just that for better or worse. The real problem with this, besides the privacy considerations for as long as we and whoever we interacted with live, is the risk that the data is lost in some way or another before historians get to analyze it. 50 years from now we'll either be in a historian's utopia (ubiquitous data) or in a modern day regression into the dark ages (with much less data than before everything became digital).