AI Knows Your Data, Not Your Life [Raw Session]

00:00 — Opening

Hey, welcome back to Slow Builds.

I've had this idea bouncing around in my head for a while now, and I still don't fully know what I think about it.

We keep hearing that AI is getting more personal. It knows what we buy, what we stream, every search we make, everything we're watching, and even how we talk. It knows our personalities. It recommends your music, your books, when you travel, places to eat, places to go.

And it answers pretty much every question in a way that can feel like it actually understands what you're asking, and who you are.

For me, it knows how I speak, and that I don't know how to spell very well. It's not that my vocabulary is that bad. It's just that my spelling is.

And that's probably only going to get more personal and more precise over time. The more it knows you, and the smarter the models get, it's just going to learn you.

So the better they get, the more it starts to understand you, instead of just giving general answers to general questions.

01:12 — The Me That Can Be Measured

But doing that makes me wonder a little bit.

Is the version of me that exists online actually the real me? Or is it just a version of me that happens to be the easiest for systems and AI to measure?

Because it has all this stored data. It has all this information from what I do online with my phone, my computer, my browsing history. Every bit of data is collected.

Even on Meta, it goes down to every click, every hesitation, things like that. It knows what you're doing. It knows how long your mouse is hovered over a button, or a link, or an image. What made you scroll back up real quick, or pause your scrolling.

It knows these things.

It knows how long, or how many times, you read a page on your Kindle.

And if you think about it, companies already have all this information about you. They can see parts of your online life. They know more about you from your online presence than you might even know about yourself. Maybe more than your partner, spouse, family, or closest friends even know.

And that behavior starts to look like a fingerprint of you. Your identity.

Not perfect, but probably good enough to make some pretty impressive predictions.

And honestly, that part is kind of amazing, but it's also kind of scary when you think about it.

02:49 — Observation Is Not Experience

The more I think about it, the more I realize that this is still observation. It's not experience.

Watching me do something through the lens of a computer or data is not the same as understanding why it mattered to me, or what was going on in my head.

Some of my favorite moments in life have almost no digital footprint at all.

I remember going to concerts where I ended up liking the opening act more than the band I actually paid to see. Nobody recommended it to me. Nobody predicted that I would like them so much. I was just there, in the moment, experiencing it.

Sometimes I'll spend an hour walking around used bookstores, not looking for anything specific. Or record stores, same idea. I'm just seeing what catches my eye. What leaflet, or cover, or footnote I pick up to read that grabs my attention.

Maybe I'll leave with nothing. Maybe I leave with a book that changes how I think about something else. Maybe it influences me.

I've bought vinyl the same way, because the album cover looked interesting. I've found clothes in little thrift stores that I probably would have never clicked on or searched for online.

04:02 — No Digital Footprint

And when my wife and I travel, I actually enjoy disconnecting a bit.

You go offline. You turn off your phone. You don't take it with you, and you're just exploring a new city, a new town, and all these brand new experiences.

You're walking instead of planning every stop. Finding little coffee shops because it smelled good. Talking to people who lived there. Eating somewhere because it wasn't on the list. You just happened to pass by, it was busy, you liked what you saw, it was a special, or you got invited in by the owner or a server.

Some of the best moments I've ever made started with absolutely no plan at all.

So there's no digital footprint. There's no way for a system, or AI, or data to get that.

And when you think back on those experiences, I don't remember looking at my phone.

I just remember being there.

04:56 — Measurement And Meaning

One thing I've noticed over the past year is that I keep coming back to the same idea from different directions.

I've talked about attention. I've talked about productivity. I've talked about AI. I've talked about convenience.

And underneath all those topics is this question:

Are we starting to confuse the things we can measure with the things that actually matter?

Attention is measurable. That doesn't make it valuable.

Money is measurable. That doesn't automatically make someone successful.

Productivity is measurable. That doesn't mean you're making progress.

And now I wonder if data is becoming another version of that.

Just because we can measure someone's behavior doesn't mean we've measured the person.

Those feel like two very different things.

05:41 — Memories That Stay Offline

So then I started thinking about memories.

Some of the memories that shaped me don't exist anywhere except inside the people who were there with me.

A conversation over coffee. A road trip. Laughing so hard with my wife and family that neither of us could finish the story. Something one of my kids said years ago that I still think about.

Those things are in my head. They're not written down. They're not digital.

Like helping someone for 10 minutes and then never seeing them again for the rest of your life.

One example is a guy I met when I was out jeeping. I came across a Jeep with a flat tire, and now he has my spare tire. I have his flat, but he has my spare.

But that's nowhere in my digital history whatsoever. I guess now it is, but until then it was never anywhere.

The location, the person's name, who was with me, what time of day it was, what GPS was showing. None of that information is anywhere.

That was just an experience that happened.

These experiences don't become data. Nobody uploads them.

If every hard drive in the world disappeared tomorrow, those memories would still be part of me. They're part of everyone that was involved.

And honestly, some of these memories shape you. They shape who I am more than my thousands of Google searches, or my random searches that mean nothing.

07:17 — Not Everything Has To Become Content

I've never really enjoyed social media that much. Not because I think it's evil.

Well, I do think it's evil.

I don't know why that was put in there. AI put that in there, but I do believe it's evil. I think it's a downgrade for society. It's hurting minds. It's causing attention issues. It needs to be controlled.

I know it has its place. It always had its place. But the value needs to be taken out of it and used as a tool, or whatever. It is what it is.

So I do think it's evil.

But I don't use it anymore because I don't want to document everything.

If I find a great restaurant, maybe I'll tell a friend over coffee. If I hear an amazing band, I'll send it to someone I think would appreciate it. If I have a great trip, most of those stories get shared around the dinner table.

Not everything has to become content.

Sometimes I think keeping the experience small actually makes it more meaningful.

It belongs to the people who were there, not to everybody.

08:22 — A Higher Resolution Version

Then my mind wanders somewhere else.

People are already talking about things like Neuralink, brain-computer interfaces, technology that one day might understand us at a much deeper level than what we type into a keyboard.

And I'm not saying that's good or bad. I honestly don't know yet.

But it made me wonder, even if technology could see everything I look at, everything I hear, and maybe even patterns in how I think, would that actually become me?

Or would it just become a much higher resolution measurement of my behavior?

I'm not sure if those are the same things anymore.

09:00 — The Parts That Never Become Digital

Maybe my digital self isn't really me.

Maybe it's just a version of me that's easiest to measure.

The real version might exist somewhere else.

In conversation. In memories. In mistakes. In random discoveries. In the places where I wander without a destination. In the songs I found by accident. The books I picked up because something about them felt interesting.

In the experiences that never needed to be uploaded to matter.

If AI is learning from digital life, what happens to the parts of me that never become digital?

I think that's the question I've been sitting with lately.

Because so much of our lives are touch, feel, and seeing with our eyes. Not stuff that we type down, put into a note, or upload to Facebook or Instagram.

They're all things that we experience as they happen.

And those are things that I don't think AI can always get.

I think there are ways that it's going to get more of it, but I still think there are parts of it that are going to be ours and ours only.

All right, thanks for watching. Bye.