Identity Augmentation

I want to talk about our identity as expressed through modern technology, not in the "who am I?" way but in the "when does the Ship of Theseus stops being the Ship of Theseus?" way.

In this metaphor, we are the Ship of Theseus, and communication technologies are the pieces being replaced in us.

Talking to me

Say we meet at the park and start having a conversation. You ask how am I doing, I say I'm doing really well, thanks, and ask how about you, to which you reply you're also doing well.

In that situation, are you really talking to me? You most likely would say: ".. uhh why yes, of course I am, Dui." while perhaps questioning my sanity if you didn't know me any better, or feeling a mix of amusement and excitement about where this will lead us if you did.

Nowadays, though, that conversation is less likely to have happened in the park and more likely to have occurred in a video call online, probably over Zoom. I'd join the meeting, we'd spend a few seconds fumbling around trying to turn our cameras on, and although we may start with a "hey, can you hear me alright?" soon after, you'd be asking me how am I doing.

Now, in that situation, are you really talking to me? At this point, you most likely would say, "Well yes, of course, Dui. I don't see any difference other than that I'm talking to you over a camera and mic instead of in person, but yeah, it's still definitely you." You may also be slightly less excited about where this will lead us by now.

Now, say that a few minutes into our call, I ask you to turn your camera off. You think about it for a bit, wondering what I'm trying to get at, but relent and click the "camera off" button. I do likewise. Our faces, being shown in real time just a second ago, are now replaced by our names, and your Zoom window now shows only a black background with a big lowercase "dui" in white letters and lousy font. You say, "can you still hear me?" I reply positively both verbally and by nodding, only one of which makes it to you.

Now, are you still really talking to me? Maybe you're getting tired of replying yes and can't see the difference between talking on Zoom with our cameras turned off or calling someone on the phone as we used to do before the advent of texting, where you'd most certainly be talking to someone.

OK, so say I ask you to turn off your mic now. You're wondering at what point are we actually going to get to chat about what you met me to talk about in the first place but decide to humor me and click the mute button. Our faces and backgrounds are blank blacks on the screen, and the icon of a little gray microphone with a diagonal red slash in front of it reassures the silence in the call is independent of my willingness to say anything verbally. After a few seconds, the chat window opens. You read the following contents "dui: hey, how are you doing?"

Now you may start to get where I'm going with things, but let's keep asking the same question for now: leaving issues of security and impersonation aside but focusing on what makes me, well, me, are you still talking to me? We exchange texts on our phones with others all the time and generally think we're talking to them, after all.

One last example and I'll move on. We finish the weirdest Zoom conversation you've ever been to, say goodbye, and get back to our lives. Later in the day, you check Whatsapp, which is incredibly popular nowadays, and see a voice message from me. You play it, and in it, you hear me saying, "Hey there, thanks for your patience playing around with Zoom with me. It's great chatting with you, and I hope you're doing well".

In that situation, is it me who sent you the voice message? When you listen to it, do you believe it's me who is talking and that, aside from it being a recording you'll have to reply to later, it's still me you're talking to?

And, despite the slight differences between talking to me in person, over video, over audio, over brief text messages and long text emails, or over video recordings.. are those all the same person you're talking to? The same Dui? The same me?

Tweaking

We're on Whatsapp again. I type, "hey how are you doin?" and my phone helpfully corrects it to "Hey, how are you doing?" before sending the message. You open it up, and you read:

"Hey, how are you doing?"

Now, who are you talking to in that situation? Are you still talking to me? I guess there's no reason why that wouldn't be the case, right? It's just a few tweaks. So you reply, "Great thanks Dui how about you?" and after spending a few seconds teaching your autocorrect not to change Dui to DUI, send it back to me.

"Great thanks Dui how about you?" shows up on my phone's screen.

I start to think about telling you I'm happy because I'm going to the beach over the weekend and start typing "great thanks! happy b" when the autocorrect suggests "birthday" instead of "because" as the center suggestion out of the three suggestions above my iPhone's virtual keyboard.

Shit, is it your birthday?? I open the calendar app on my phone; sure enough, it is your birthday! Damn, I almost forgot (or did I actually forget?). I type, "great thanks! happy b[complete] hope you enjoy this special day"

"Great, thanks! Happy Birthday, hope you enjoy this special day." arrives my reply under your original prompt.

You read the message, and it fills you with warm feelings about my thoughtfulness in reaching out to you, unlike that other person you thought was your friend but whom you haven't heard from yet.

Now, we're getting progressively further by giving me small changes, minor tweaks. Are you still talking to me in this case?

Acknowledgements

I will pick a few random books and list their acknowledgments section to make a point. They all say something along these lines:

Several persons deserve thanks and credit for having helped me when my progress was impeded by my ignorance. [..]
Stephenson, Neal. Reamde (p. 1043). Atlantic Books. Kindle Edition.

Many of the lessons in this book came with a knock to the head. Still, I did learn. So I’m grateful for those who gave me that opportunity. [..]
Green, Alexander. The Gone Fishin' Portfolio: 19 (Agora Series) . Wiley. Kindle Edition.

This book took its time. I feel tremendously grateful to everyone who allowed it to do so, and who shaped it in many invaluable respects along the way. [..]
Burkeman, Oliver. Four Thousand Weeks (p. 261). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition.

Ah. So I see you, too, are one of those people who reads acknowledgments. Welcome, friend. You and I have a lot in common. If writing can feel like birthing a Honda Civic, then writing a book is like birthing a car dealership full of them. It's not pretty. You sweat a lot. Most of the work is done while crying. But you are not alone. My name might be on this book, but the following people helped. [..]
Handley, Ann. Everybody Writes (p. xvii). Wiley. Kindle Edition.

Those are just literally the books that were on the top of my most recently clicked ebooks, except for Matthew Perry's Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing, which just says "thanks to [..]" and wouldn't help me make my point and Cal Newport's Deep Work which, surprisingly, doesn't have any acknowledgments!

In any case, the point is that the pattern of acknowledgements and their prevalence has to do with this identity question: Who wrote the book? When you're reading a book someone wrote, who are you talking to?

Technically you're talking to the author(s). But on the one hand, copy editors can significantly influence what gets written, including things like "this whole thing is crap, throw it away and start again" and "remove this paragraph, talk about this other topic now, explain this thing." On the other hand, conversations, feedback, lessons from the past, and so many other things from friends and experts shape what gets written in immeasurable ways.

Given all of the above, when reading someone's book, whose book are you reading? Are authors just paying lip service to others' contributions, or is there something in it? And where does it end?

Grammarly

The thing about text is that it's on text that we start to see the most tangible impacts of augmentation. It is much harder with today's technology for zoom to stop me mid-sentence in a video call than for Grammarly to stop me mid-sentence when I'm writing.

Suppose I'm emailing you to discuss some of this article's ideas. I write down the following:

So, I've been mulling over this idea in my head about Theseus's ship and at what point of changing it stops being the same ship, and about how does that apply to things we say when augmented with the intervention and aid of technology. I'm curious about your thoughts. Take care, Dui.

So that's my draft. This is what I'm saying. But I'm also using Grammarly, a tool that uses Machine Learning and looks at your writing to provide suggestions. Here's what it has to say about what, well, I have to say.

That's relatively minor, but it's already something. By the time this article is finished, Grammarly will have given me suggestions on grammar, clarity, engagement, and even confidence.

At that point, whose article will you be reading?

Ghostwriting

Let's push this further. Who are you talking to when reading a Ghostwritten text?

On one end of the spectrum, there is "go ahead and write an article on X," which is arguably just authored by the Ghostwriter, and not by the person prompting the ghostwriter to talk about X. The author is just lending his name to the actual person you're talking to.

On the other end of the spectrum is "I'll dictate the story, and I want you to write it down exactly as I say it." The author, dictating the story, is now doing the heavy lifting of what is being said, and the writer just writing down what they're hearing is not really the person you're talking to.

But somewhere in the middle, there's something akin to "Hey, let me tell you about a childhood story, and I want you to write it. When you're done, we'll review it together, and I'll provide suggestions and fill in details I may have missed the first time around. We'll repeat that cycle until it's finished."

In that latter case, when you read the story, who are you reading? Who are you talking to?

What if that Ghostwriter is a robot? Does that change anything?

ChatGPT

Let's go back to the example email I sent you:

So, I've been mulling over this idea in my head about Theseus's ship and at what point of changing it stops being the same ship, and about how does that apply to things we say when augmented with the intervention and aid of technology. I'm curious about your thoughts. Take care, Dui.

This time I'll ask ChatGPT to improve it for me. Here's what it says:

Read that again. I will wait.

There are many things I find curious about ChatGPT's suggested improvements. "I'd love to hear your thoughts" is much more polite and warm than "I'm curious about." "I've been thinking about" is more serious and definite than the hesitant "I've been mulling over," and "the concept" is a much more precise way to describe what I was getting to with the Ship of Theseus since the concept itself doesn't yet have a name.

Further and more interestingly, while my original point was roughly about how the Ship of Theseus identity question applies to changes in what we say through technology and how that defines whether it was we who said it, ChatGPT expands it to both physical objects and then our own thoughts and ideas, and uses deep words like "fundamentally alters" to imply a different level of change. It's a similar but different question, but it could be a good one nonetheless.

Now, if I sent you an email exactly as ChatGPT's suggestion, who would you be talking to?

What if I only took his "I'd love to hear your thoughts" suggestion and came across more warmly? Would you still be talking to me? Am I, then, warm? At least on emails?

What if I took his "it fundamentally alters its identity" part and added it to my arguments? Would that still be me?

Now what if instead of asking ChatGPT to improve a full excerpt I gave it, I instead just gave it a prompt and asked, "How does the concept of Theseus ship applies to technology and artificial intelligence and what we create?" and it told me the following (which it did):

Which is kind of vacuous but somewhat interesting. If I agreed with it and added it to my email sent to you, a Ghostwritten paragraph written at my command by a robot, then who would you be talking to? Me?

Choose your own adventure

Choose your adventure is an old term that describes books that were interactive like games, where you would read until a particular fork in the story, and you made a decision for the character in the book and read the page that described what happened next. If you want to go into the cave and explore it, then go to page 137; walk away, go to page 245.

When talking to someone synchronously, when we are quickly replying to what the other is saying, it's like we're choosing our own adventure as we go. Like a game of chess where you can't see the moves in advance, you ask me if I watched the latest TV Show on Netflix, and I think about your question and then say I didn't and ask how you did you like it, and you, in turn, think about my question and then say you think it's great and recommend I watch it.

In some situations, though, particularly in professional settings, we talk as if we are playing chess and can see the moves in advance and should plan our messages accordingly. PR, Legal, Human Resources, etc., are full of such preparations: "if they ask this, we answer that; if they ask that, we answer this." The reason we do it in a professional setting is so that you can create alignment with a team, say a lawyer and a witness being prepped, and so you can answer the right thing in a critical moment, say when an employee asks the CEO a sensitive question in front of the whole company.

In a personal setting, we don't use these conversational forks as much, mainly because of a lack of tools and because it's not economical. While we may prepare before asking someone out who we really like or rehearse before a breakup, for the most part, it's too much effort with little return thinking about how conversations will go and what you will say depending on what they say, at least thinking about it in ways more sophisticated than what you'll have for lunch if your favorite is not on the menu.

Because conversational forks, as used today, are most often built by several different people and in a professional setting, it's a bit harder to think about identity with them since it's less intuitive to assign an identity to groups such as companies than it is to people (although we still do it!). So let's get out of text messages for a bit and talk about voice messages again to separate the existence of a conversational fork itself from the fact that the messages are all coming from the same person, us.

Say you sent me a text on Whatsapp, "hey Dui, I am interested in learning more about Stoicism and I wonder if you could give me a book recommendation." I reply with an audio message, saying in a happy tone: "Hey there, glad to hear from you! I'm not sure if you know anything about Stoicism yet, but if you don't, then I think you should read William Irvine's A Guide to the Good Life. If you are familiar with Stoicism and are just looking for a more in-depth guide of the system, but that's still accessible, read Donald Robertson's Stoicism and the Art of Happiness. Have a great day! Dui"

Would you consider it was me who sent you this message? I think that's a reasonable assumption, yes, and you might think so too.

Now, suppose, weird that I am, I instead replied to you with a text message that said:

"yo, if you are really new to stoicism, listen to this msg: [Audio]"

A few minutes later, you get another one:

"otherwise, listen to this: [Audio]"

The audio messages themselves are similar to the one where I talk about both suggestions, except they focus specifically on a single book suggestion for that specific situation. You choose the second message because you're a little familiar with Stoicism and get my actual recommendation just like before. In that situation, are you still talking to me?

Interestingly, you decide to curiously peek at the other audio message, the one I sent in case you weren't familiar with Stoicism. You note that, unlike the second audio message, this recommendation for someone really new to Stoicism wasn't recorded just now. I don't call you by your name at the beginning of the message, and there's some background noise like I'm recording it somewhere in the open. You hear a dog barking in the background even though I have no dogs right now, but I had one a couple of years ago, which is when I actually recorded the audio I just forwarded to you.

In a situation where I just replied with an audio from two years ago where I say something similar to what I'd have told you in an audio message if I had recorded it today, are you still talking to me?

Lifebox

Let's mix things up a little bit. In Rudy Rucker's The Lifebox, The Seashell and the Soul, the author introduces the concept of a Lifebox, which is just one of the many variations of uploading our brains to some digital form. I won't describe it in detail, but I'll keep the name. Just assume Lifebox is some metaphor for digital brain.

Suppose I have at my disposal a technology that's not as sophisticated as an actual Lifebox, a digital brain simulating my own brain, but something really close to what we have the technology to do today, a mix of ChatGPT and knowledge about my opinions and values. Let's call it Dui's Lifebox.

I have a chat with Dui's Lifebox at an earlier time and tell it, "hey, my favorite recommendation for a book for someone starting in Stoicism is William Irvine's A Guide to the Good Life. If they know a bit about it, it's Donald Robertson's Stoicism and the Art of Happiness." My Lifebox tells me, "cool, I'll keep that in mind."

Now, let's go back to text. Like earlier, you message me on Whatsapp, "hey Dui, I am interested in learning more about Stoicism and I wonder if you could give me a book recommendation." I reply to your text with a text, "hey! are you just starting in Stoicism or do you know a bit about it?". At first, you just think to yourself .. "shoot, Dui is really on top of his text messages; I wonder if he's checking his phone more often than once a week on Saturdays now?" .. and then when you shrug off those thoughts, you reply "I know a bit about it, just want to dig deeper" to which I reply immediately as if I'm typing at 300 words per minute "Great, I recommend you read Donald Robertson's Stoicism and the Art of Happiness then!". You reply with, "Wow, thanks for your prompt suggestion, Dui!" I respond with, "You're most welcome, great to hear from you!" and that's that.

As you may imagine, my messages weren't really being sent directly by me typing them out on my iPhone's virtual keyboard on Whatsapp, but by Dui's Lifebox, a ChatGPT similar tool that knew some of my preferences and values and knew how to answer your question in a similar way to which I would if I was holding an iPhone in hands and typing on a virtual keyboard, except without a 7 days delay and with the correct capitalization of "I" on text messages. Now, are you talking to me in that case?

Languages

Let's take a slight detour.

It's hard to discuss what we say and how it changes, without talking about languages.

Some of us speak only a single language, and some more than one. A few of us speak many languages fluently. Does the language we use change who we are?

The last time I was in the US, I spent a lot of time speaking English, the official language we use at work. When getting a ride back to the airport, I got into an Uber with a Spanish-speaking driver, and we struck up a conversation in Spanish, talking about some of the food he liked and what he did to get the right ingredients to cook it in the US.

When we stepped out of the car, my wife remarked to me, "It's funny, but when you speak Spanish, you sound like a different person." Now, my wife is most likely the person who knows me the best in the world, so if there's a person I would be different from when speaking in Spanish, she would know.

And, in the end, what does she mean? What exactly is different about the different person Dui who was speaking in Spanish compared to the person Dui speaking English? What is it about being a different person but being the same person? What precisely is different, and what is the same?

I was talking about this topic with someone I know who remarked that her daughter lived in Paris for a while and worked at a company where everyone spoke French. She had conversational French, but it wasn't fluent enough for her as for some of the other natives. So once she remarked that she couldn't make many jokes or use humor in French, even though that's something she always did in her native language, English. In that case, is she serious? Is someone who doesn't speak the language fluently shy?

Importantly, when you talk to someone in different languages and they speak in different ways and different things in those different languages, are you talking to the same person?

The medium is the messenger

In Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death, a critique from the 90s about how TV shapes public discourse that's prescient on the further impact to it by the Internet, he analyzes in detail how the different mediums impact what can be said in different ways and, therefore, impacts what is being said in them. This derives from Marshall McLuhan's famous maxim, "The medium is the message," concisely capturing the symbiotic relationship between what is being said and the medium in which it is being said.

But if the medium is the message, what happens in a world surrounded by communication technology, where all messages are processed and influenced by various technologies before they reach us, and where the mediums are not only influencing messages sent forth by the media, the PR firms, the governments, and the news.. but all of the messages sent by all of us?

In that world, it's hard to extricate the person saying the message and the medium where it's being said.

Now the medium is the messenger.

Identity augmentation

The influence of these technological mediums over what is said makes it difficult to pinpoint what part of what is being said is the medium and what part is, well for lack of a better word, us.

I call this identity augmentation: how our identities are changed in different ways by the medium through which they are expressed.

In a digital world where almost everything we hear from somebody reaches us through some modern technological medium and where more and more communications mediums are created for us to communicate with each other, the only constant is that at least everything we're hearing from somebody in all these different platforms is all being said by this one person.

Or is it?