What if you trained a model on videos of using an iPhone 1?
The digital preservation manifesto talks about how many things from the past don’t exist anymore because they were dynamic. We have screenshots and videos of Apple iOS 1.0 from 2007 and perhaps even a handful of devices still with that version loaded, but you can’t experience it in all it’s glory because all the back end services of the era simple don’t exist in a compatible way today.
As the last 10-20 years have seen an explosion in cloud services, more and more systems of the past will be unexperienceable in any meaningful way. This is perhaps where AI can help in that we can now / soon build virtual worlds trained from our knowledge. It should therefore be entirely possible to train a model on graphics, text and human input on these old systems and then simulate them in a mostly convincing way.
Why? There is historical value in understanding how people interacted with relics of the past. How and why were they designed that way? What does that say about the people, culture and time period? We have numerous relics of the past where we have only guesses as to how something operated or how it was used. Grand examples like the great Pyramids in Egypt or even more mundane like coal towers for railroads of only 100 years ago. The dynamic knowledge was lost and now we wonder what we are missing today.
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