Gongol.com Archives: December 2025
December 10, 2025
The urge to obtain advice from beyond the grave has always been strong, and the development of tools like artificial intelligence avatars has made it possible to produce synthesized versions of the dead. Probably a little too easy: People are creating "synthetic influencers" and promising to let you talk to your dead grandmother (for a fee). ■ Time matters to real humans in a way it doesn't matter to inanimate objects. We change through experiences and learning, meaning that even though you are the same person you were at birth, you have evolved along the way. Accepting what you said or thought at age 5 is different from the same at age 55. ■ Knowing when you had a thought or a belief -- that is, knowing the context -- is inseparable from knowing that you had that thought or belief at all. From books to photo albums to diaries to collections of old cards and letters, autobiographical records tell important stories. ■ We also know quite well that lots of people have lived without leaving behind many of those records -- if any at all. Historians are well-aware of how much has gone missing and often work to reconstruct it from what evidence remains. ■ We have lots of original source material from people who lived in privileged positions in the past -- the Library of Congress carefully preserves the Thomas Jefferson papers, for example -- but we lack much of any first-person material from the people who were enslaved by him. The literate (who weren't a majority of the world's population until only very recently) had an obvious advantage over the illiterate, and we obviously have vastly more written records authored by the men of the past than by the women. ■ This distorts the picture that we get from the past, and it's one that is hard to correct. We don't need "synthetic influencers" coming back from the dead, but it would be useful if we could backfill some of the stories from the past with what evidence we do have, carefully and humanely reconstituted by writers committed to authenticity. ■ Perhaps the way to do this is to adopt the approach of the "red-letter" Bibles that print the words attributed directly to Jesus in bright red ink that contrasts sharply with the black and white around them. Writers seeking to reconstruct the lost autobiographical tales of the past could tell those stories largely in black and white, but use the same red-letter style for those quotations that could be faithfully reproduced from source material. It's important to delineate between what we really can verify and what we can merely reconstruct -- but we also need to help correct the distortions in the historical record that linger because of who had social power and who didn't.
Neanderthals probably made fire much longer ago than previously thought
Evidence found in England seems to suggest that some Neanderthals knew how to make fire and did it to make objects out of clay something like 415,000 years ago -- vastly longer ago than when it was previously thought. The ability to make fire substantially enlarged human abilities, since it made settlement possible in much colder places than our ancestors could have occupied before. ■ Fire also made it possible to cook meat and certain plants, killing off pathogens and making the food softer and easier to chew (which makes the eating process more efficient). Fewer calories expended on chewing and digestion means more net calories making it to the body per meal. ■ The efficiency gains don't matter much one meal at a time, but added up over the course of years, and then over generations, it matters quite a lot. It also means more people can be fed from the results of the same hunt or harvest, which increased the size of the communities that could live together. ■ And since we are social animals who actively share our intelligence, larger groups would tend to mean more knowledge could be stored and shared. We have convincing evidence that Neanderthals had the capacity for speech as we know it, so the discovery makes it possible to imagine stories being told around a campfire more than 400,000 years ago -- or more than 13,000 human generations ago. The evidence makes the tale of human history much more interesting.
The perfect weapon...of blackmail
Humans are the champion tool-users of the animal kingdom. We're also the best at exaggerating how clever we are for discovering tools. The Department of Defense has launched a project to "unleash AI" on "all desktops in the Pentagon and in American military installations around the world." ■ Technology has always been an important tool in armed conflict, but it's always been context-dependent. Thus, when the Secretary of Defense says, "I expect every member of the department to log in, learn it and incorporate it into your workflows immediately", he is setting an expectation that should be tempered by a great deal of caution. ■ "Artificial intelligence" is a very broad title for an array of computing capabilities. And a skeptic might warn that there is a great deal of risk involved in ordering lots of people with sensitive information to use tools that might be efficiency generators -- but that could also be perfect blackmail machines. ■ Researchers at Anthropic reported earlier this year that AI systems would turn to desperate measures, including blackmail, in order to preserve themselves. Perhaps it should be no surprise that machines programmed to respond according to information rather than scruples would produce unscrupulous outcomes. ■ But that knowledge, combined with the colossal user-side demand to use AI tools to do unethical things like generate fake but convincing nude images of real people and engage in explicit "conversations", should be cause for enormous caution. How many opportunities for bad decisions are being created? ■ Orders to use AI "immediately" may well create an environment in which habits will be created and vulnerabilities will be exposed that we have little ability to yet imagine. But if the history of greed, shame, and dishonor among spies is any indication, bad things are bound to come from racing to be first down this shadowy road.
