Stumbled across the new voice this afternoon after months of not using voice mode and after being impressed by the naturalness, was also let down by the disinterested tone. That combined with the platitudes and tendency to repeat back to me what I was saying without new information left me disappointed with the update.

I envision this system as an evolving, fluid mapping of things to hashes, and hashes (or hash-space locations) to meaning, all controlled by users, institutions, experts, and authorities. So if you were to radically change appearance, it’d be down to those who have something to say about you to update where it’s pointed. You raise a good point in general, though, that all kinds of things can change appearance for all kinds of reasons, even to the point of being unrecognizable, and while I can’t think of any examples right now, I bet there are things that do that with some regularity. It’s down to the inputs to the system and their amalgamation into a hash to be robust to that within reason, and the rest of the way for the authors of data to take care of the rest, much in the same way everything written about the artist Prince still applies to him under his later name/symbol, whether it was updated or not. Same for brands that rebrand, countries that change hands, etc.

With the acknowledgment that it’s a controversial opinion, I think the most important ‘domain’ tied to our identity is our appearance, most importantly our face. I’ve been advocating for a time that we need to think about a ‘DNS’ that, in discrete, decentralized, decoupled steps, goes from the appearance of real-world things to meaning/language to links to digital things.

I’ve also written a little speculative fiction about what that might look like. https://open.substack.com/pub/noahnorman/p/all-the-kinds-of-...

I’ve got X - the entire service - muted and I’m reminded why almost daily