Eon Ark

Sounds Fun and Claire Isabel Webb

Remembrance of Things to Come

The smell of a woman’s fur coat at the Seattle Symphony transports me to the jewelry box my mother kept her shells in; the sodden and cloying scent of lilies at Trader Joe’s in Silverlake recalls the floral arrangement at my friend’s grandmother’s funeral, the first person I had really known who had died. We have no control over how we are remembered or the artifacts that remain after our deaths that trigger such memories. Often, these experiences of remembering are often beyond words, and yet words are the best tools we have to describe the phenomena of memory and what it means to remember and be remembered.

The early 20th-century French writer Marcel Proust popularized a parlor game in which participants answered a series of personality questions intended to reveal their nature—their preferences and predilections, their accomplishments and shortcomings. Intimate questions, among others, were:   What is your idea of perfect happiness? What is your greatest fear? What is the trait you most deplore in yourself? And so on. (We like to imagine gaggles of Parisian aristocrats and countryside bourgeoisie atwitter with revelations about their friends and lovers, sipping Bordeaux fireside.)

Proust’s best-known work is a sprawling, seven-part novel, À la Recherche du Temps Perdu (In Search of Lost Time), translated into English as Remembrance of Things Past. The work is in an impressionistic style, in which the narrator recalls both vague and vivid memories of his youth and young adulthood. In the famous “episode of the madeleine,” the now-adult narrator tastes the little pastry and time travels to his childhood in Combray, France. This small moment triggers deep reflections, calling to the surface his latent memories. 

The Proust Questionnaire (as the game came to be called) inspired this Future Relic, but our modification explores how future humans will increasingly rely on, and collaborate with, computational entities. Our take weaves in themes dear to the Future Humans Program at the Berggruen Institute: the histories and futures of life, mind, and outer space. We invite you to answer questions that, like the original parlor game, are intimate and telling of who you are, but will further inspire you to contemplate your consciousness in relation to emergent companion intelligences like AIs. That is, human inventions like text-to-image generators, Large Language Models, and Cognitive Neural Nets are AIs that help us preserve, parse, and play with data—and in turn, are new tools we can wield to reconsider memory, time, and indeed, what it means to be human.

The Eon Ark is one such tool. It captures your idiosyncratic lexical footprint through AI technologies (unavailable to Mr. Proust) to craft an impression of your personality. Your answers to the Proustian Questionnaire distill a representation, the Eon Ark, oriented to future humans. The Relic is your consciousness—your thoughts, characteristics, feelings, and philosophies—all rendered in technological amber. 

How is this possible? We leverage Large Language Models (LLMs), powerful pattern and prediction machines. Language is information ordered in a symbolic system. It is the scaffolding of cognition. Where human and computational languages mesh is a novel possibility space of creative logics. When you write about your passions, fears, and deepest desires, the bespoke LLM embedded in the Eon Ark taps into your linguistic pattern—your style, phrases, vocabulary, grammar, and even punctuation—to generate a digital fingerprint of you. 

To translate this digital object into a physical object we use a highly specialized glass that is designed to last, far, far longer than amber. By embedding your cognitive footprint into glass, the Eon Ark safe keeps a replica of your consciousness. You become an ambassador to future humans.  

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The advent of LLMs becoming publicly available just a year and a half ago—OpenAI launched ChatGPT in November 2022—generated breathless speculation about the shifting landscape of humans’ and computational tools’ place in creativity and the future of language. The use of these technologies, though, is just the latest to facilitate humans’ timeless impulse to create platforms and objects to remember those who came before us and be remembered by those who come after. The Incan quipu system, stone tablets etched by ancient Egyptian scribes, Facebook profiles of deceased users, AOL email, are all written documentations of human experiences; they are versions of our Future Relic, the Eon Ark. The right prompting can resurrect our thoughts and allow others to query and engage with them. The Eon Ark, then, is a purposeful meditation. It is an effort to live, in some way, forever with intention. It says to Time, “Some version of my consciousness will go on forever, and I will do it on my own terms.”   The world is dealing with an alarmingly decreasing birth rate, a phenomenon that will have a profound effect on how society functions. At the same time, catastrophic changes to our planet’s climate are threatening vulnerable communities and erasing long-standing ways of life.  We will likely rely more and more on digital, networked AI technologies to augment our abilities to connect to others and share information with our neighbors. An LLM-based agent, for instance, might generate a variety of artificial entities with distinct personalities who will provide nuanced connections and services—all powered by a melange of human, computational, and even nonhuman animal languages. How will the personalities inhabiting the Eon Ark interact with these agents? Over the course of a billion years, many possible futures could blossom. 

To ferry you and other passengers on the Eon Ark into the future, we embed the prompts that create the AI replicas informed by the answers to the questions in glass. Glass does not decompose and stands the best chance of surviving for thousands of years. But to reach a billion years, we must rely on future generations to relay information. The Eon Ark displays several different languages that convey the instructions,  “Replicate and Preserve This Data.” 

In the spirit of reinvigorating and preserving past and future systems of knowledge, the Eon Ark integrates binary, the foundational language of computers, and quipu, the ancient Inca abacus-like system of tracking numerical values.  In addition to English, Arabic, and Chinese, we have represented the message as pictograms. We anticipate multiple points of failure; the language may become extinct, the glass may shatter, or the technology may become esoteric — But used in conjunction with each other, the representations of the message compound our chances of success. As with all things, time will tell. 

We must rely on generations of the far, far future to relay our Eon Ark across time. We hope that our vessels pique future humans’ curiosity and that they, in turn, propel the Eon Ark ever forward into an impossible-to-comprehend future.