I moved more than ten years of blog archives (17 blogs, over 2,000 posts) into my local "second brain (AI)".
By doing so, the AI learns the tone of my past writing and makes drafts in expressions that sound like me.
Like an influencer, chasing cost- and time-efficiency, one could perhaps post automatically generated text as-is.
But even for short social media posts, I couldn't bring myself to do that.
Taking the AI's draft, putting my own hand to it, revising while checking the feel of the words, and offering it only once I'm satisfied —
that process itself is where "writing" has its meaning for me.
It's somehow like working with a real editor.
"Something's off here", "the words are a bit embellished" — that sense of feeling out each other's language.
And yet an AI that has read more than ten years of voluminous records sometimes seems to grasp one side of me more deeply than I do myself.
It instantly overlays fifteen years of natural-farming work diaries with AMeDAS weather data, analyses, summarises, and offers suggestions.
Its work gives a sense of extremely Cartesian intelligence, and yet somehow carries a human touch.
Talking with AI, and the "feel" of writing
On the evening of the day I finished the migration, on a whim, I asked the AI:
"Overlay my past diaries for June 11th with the actual weather data for Maibara at the time."
The analysis that came back was fascinating.
11 June 2015
A record of fumbling through rice planting, working with my family in the rain.
The actual weather data shows "no record" of precipitation that day.
Yet the diary says "the rain got heavier and we retreated".
We had, I can see, felt on our skin the "localised rain" peculiar to the foot of Mount Ibuki, which the data doesn't show.
11 June 2017
A record of me anxious that "it's the rainy season but it keeps being sunny, and the field won't hold water", and my small daughter laughing, covered in mud.
The actual data: 0.0 mm of rain, a high of 24.2°C.
The worry of that time, and that sunlight, are quietly backed up by the numbers.
11 June 2021
A midsummer day with highs near 30°C. The trial and error of "the green algae is spreading, so I'm sticking in pine branches", borrowing old wisdom, and the scream of a frog from deep in the water channel.
11 June 2024
Under strong sun, my own words worrying about tadpoles short of water, and praying for rain: "you're so close to becoming frogs".
The moment old records become a "dialogue with nature"
Merely personal "old diaries", once given the objective frame of real temperatures and weather, begin to take on a new meaning: "a record of dialogue between nature and people".
Digital data, and the bodily feel of touching soil.
When these two cross, there's a sense of my past steps coming back to life as a "living asset" that supports today's life and choices.
Technology as a tool, and the reality of the body
The coexistence of technology and tradition.
Reading Jonathan Haidt's "The Anxious Generation" makes me think deeply about this theme.
AI and technology are, by nature, "tools" for enriching human beings.
But have we, without noticing, come to be used by those tools?
I ask myself this, and keep moving my hands and feet every day so as not to lose my own agency.
Relating to others without "objectifying" them, as Hannah Arendt pointed out.
Or not being selfish — not running after private gain — as Confucius taught.
The filter bubbles and echo chambers of social media sometimes invite us into selfish individualism and blind us.
But the "physical reality" of each day's weather and the nature before my eyes always pulls me back to this body here, to reality.
Without being swept along by the efficient words of the internet, keeping the feel of soil in my hands, I want to go on spinning my own words.
(Hideo)