Permanence, Identity, and Creative Destruction
Many cultures feature unique takes on permanence, identity, and creative destruction in a way that colors adherents’ views of reality. Consider the sand mandalas created by Tibetan Buddhists: These breathtaking pieces of art take weeks to construct and are made entirely of sand (historically tiny gemstones). After they have been completed and viewed, they are destroyed with a single, firm sweep. The process of creating something beautiful you plan to destroy immediately afterward is meant to impart an understanding of impermanence on the creator and help them embrace the concept.
Sand mandalas both symbolize a certain view of permanence and teach it through their creation. Consider, in contrast, the cultural mindset that produced the Clock of the Long Now: A timepiece designed to keep accurate time for over a millennium. The Clock of the Long Now is not meant to be viewed by anyone or serve as a public art piece; its purpose is simply to quietly exist for as long as it conceivably can. This project is being worked on by the Long Now Foundation, which promotes this longer view of history.
While we respect the sacrifice that goes into these extremes, we ultimately see both as self-indulgent wastes of time. This judgment reflects our own bias about how identity persists through time via the family line and culture. A perception of identity closer to our own is that held by some branches of the Jewish cultural tradition, which conceptualize the “tribe” as the primary unit of identity across generations. Iterations of this type of tradition can also be seen in groups with intercultural classes, like some Brahmins, in which your class comprises a major part of your identity. Army units represent a secular iteration of this mindset; they serve as cultural throughlines able to earn glory through the actions of their members (with Roman legions even being able to “die” based on the actions of their members).
A modern conceptualization of identity is that of the online persona. An online persona may represent a fraction of an individual (in that they may have multiple online personas), may represent multiple individuals, and may even be passed down through time. The manner in which online identities are often fractionalized, shared, and/or passed down is not new; it is, after all, theorized that while Hippocrates likely started as a single individual, most of what is attributed to him is actually from a school of individuals that all used “Hippocrates” as their pen name.
We suspect that the concept of fractionalized and composite identity will be picked up by some strands of pop culture given how easy it is to execute in online contexts. Fractionalized identities can serve as an excuse to not take responsibility for one’s actions, making them a huge draw of many pop cultures (i.e., “StarKitty called a SWAT team to your house; she is just one of my many personas—it is wrong to punish all of them for just her actions,” or “Sure, I said you were a fat pig online, but I was just writing as GossipMonger6969—tons of people write under that name and I’m just maintaining its harsh tone”).
With the rise of AI, the concept of identity is going to become much more tricky. Even today’s rudimentary AI can effectively simulate people. For example, the Infinite Conversation[[165]](#_ftn165) is an AI-generated, never-ending discussion between Werner Herzog and Slavoj Žižek. It mimics (imperfectly but impressively) not just the sorts of things they would say but also the tonality of their voices. Given what deepfake technology can already achieve, we are not far from a future in which AI will be able to very effectively model and mimic—both in behavior and appearance—anyone who has been moderately well documented.
Given the speed of technological advancement and the fact that nearly all humans in developed nations carry little microphones around nearly 24/7, it only makes sense that a product we will see in our (or our children’s) lifetimes is a virtual AI clone that can handle our interactions, phone calls, social media posts, work tasks, etc. These surrogates will allow us to automate as much of our virtual social and professional lives as we want. How will cultures choose to handle these? Will we regard interactions with a person’s AI surrogate as equivalent to an interaction with that person? Will there be a way to translate social capital built by the AI to the human it represents?
If your head is already spinning, consider that in addition to perfectly emulating us, these AI avatars will be better than the “real” thing. They will have access to the entire internet with a thought, be able to alter their appearance as they like and have access to processing power we could only dream of. They will be wittier, more eloquent, better informed, and more attractive versions of ourselves. For cultures that don’t believe in a soul, which iteration of the person will be considered more valuable? If only one manifestation of “you” can exist, which would you choose? Outside of primacy, the AI will be functionally better in every respect—except that it may not interpret its feelings with the same qualia that we, organic meat puppets that we are, do.