I've been thinking about a slightly awkward problem for personalised AI: some of the things that matter most about a person may never have become data.
I saved a chapter recently called The carriers, by Doug Scott. He describes relationships built over years through small private exchanges, gestures, remembered acts and long periods where very little is said at all. Look only at the public record and much of what made those relationships meaningful simply isn't there.
In the follow-on chapter, The data problem, he makes the argument more explicit. Some of this material is short, private, embedded in relationships and difficult to understand without the history around it.
That caught my attention because so much of the promise around increasingly personal AI can sound like a context problem. Give a system more information, connect more sources, preserve more memory and it can build a richer picture of us.
There is obviously something to that. A system given access to years of messages, documents, photographs, calendars and conversations would have more to work with than one that knows only what somebody has put into the public domain. But more context is still context that exists.
Relationships are full of moments nobody thought to preserve. A joke that only makes sense to two people. The fact that somebody showed up. A tone of voice. A conversation nobody thought to record. A three-word reply that carries twenty years of shared history with it. Even when the message survives, the meaning may not.
I've been thinking about something related this week in a completely different context: meet you at your own definitions. In business and data work, two people can use the same word and mean different things. You can spend a lot of energy teaching everybody the correct definition, even when they don't particularly want or need one. Sometimes it is more useful to start with what they mean and work from there.
That presents problems of its own, obviously. Shared definitions exist for a reason. But it is also a reminder that having the words is not the same as having the meaning. The meaning can belong to a team, a relationship, a particular moment or years of accumulated context that never appears in the sentence itself.
That seems different from the usual problem of finding, organising or retrieving data. It made me wonder whether missing data is even quite the right description. Some of this material was never missing from a database. It was never in one. It existed as experience, memory and relationship.
That distinction becomes interesting if we imagine AI systems becoming much more personal: able to remember what we have told them, search across information we choose to give them and build a persistent model of what matters to us. They may become extremely good at reading the traces we leave behind, but the traces are still not the whole person.
One possible answer is the second brain, a term I seem to hear and read about more and more. Capture more deliberately. Keep the notes, messages, decisions, memories and links somewhere a system can interrogate later. I can see the appeal, particularly if the alternative is useful context disappearing whenever somebody leaves, forgets or simply moves on.
But does a second brain solve this problem, or become another thing to manage? It only helps if the useful material gets into it somehow. At some point the attempt to preserve context can become an overhead of its own. And do you really want to put everything into one?
That isn't an argument that AI cannot understand people, or that private human experience is somehow inaccessible to machines by definition. Plenty of things that were once unrecorded can now be captured, and people may choose to give increasingly personal systems access to much more of their lives. But the answer cannot simply be assumed to be capture everything.
Would recording every conversation, preserving every message and turning more of ordinary life into retrievable context actually solve the problem? Or would some of the value of these exchanges change precisely because they were no longer small, private and unrecorded?
I don't know. What I do know is that a person leaves at least two kinds of trace. There is the material that can be found: the things they wrote, made, photographed, sent or stored. Then there is whatever remains in other people: what they remember, what they learned, what a particular sentence meant at a particular moment.
I know that one personally. What turned out to be the last conversation I had with my Grandad in person has stayed with me. The words weren't really new; many of them had been repeated over years of conversations. What was new was the emotion shared in that moment. For the first and last time, I learned something new about him: how deeply he felt about what we were talking about.
That's very hard to describe. I remember the feeling of it more than the words. It will probably stay with me and, eventually, die with me. A real human moment.
Put that in your context window.