Join the discussion
Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.
- Hacker News
- Shameless plug, but related, is the Watsi platform[1] I discovered a few months ago through another HN user. You can read the story of less fortunate but alive people and how much need there is in the world for one another. The founder's talk[2], Chase Adam, which made me a supporter, is a must-see. I guess it's time to rewatch it..by mateioo7
- >You have drawn a boy, born in the Korean Peninsula in 3394 BCE
>Life expectancy at birth: 28 yrs
>Died before age 5: 42%
>Died before age 15: 50%
i knew life expectancy was obviously lower, but those stats were a bit eye opening.
unfortunately, died at 3 from an accident.
- I think the model has an unusual preference for the Korean Peninsula before Christ. A number of commenters, including myself, draw from this area and period.by hliyan
- I do wonder if that life expectancy is dragged significantly down by all the ways you can die early on in life, so that it's not so much that 28 years is an old age for the time as it is a function of all things that prevent you from getting to old age.
And so if you went to a town square or market in that time (if it's a time that had such a thing), perhaps it might still be perfectly normal to see people in their 30s, 40s, 50s.
by glenstein - My first run got Korean Peninsula in 3064 BCE...
That is surprisingly similar given how few people seem to have commented so far. Makes me wonder if some part of this is starting from a constant seed or something...
"Any Korean Ever"
by scottmcmac - "You have died of Dysentery [on the Korean Peninsula in 3064 BCE at 2 months old]"
I was actually a bit surprised since it also said I was exclusively breastfed which seems to be fairly protective against diarrhea. I have a feeling this didn't account for all the joint probability distributions...
by scottmcmac - I died at 1 in Mesopotamia in 3966 BCE of dysentery.by bena
- Strangely, I too, died in the Korean Peninsula at 8 months old, but circa 6000 BCE.by hliyan
- Babies died of diarrhea anyway. Breastfeeding is not a panacea. If it were, doctors would simply prescribe a flask of breast milk, and mothers would earn money by prolonging lactation for Big Medicine.by IAmBroom
- Yeah, it doesn't give totally absurd combinations (like a male dying of birth complications at age 10), but the probabilities are still likely rather rough approximations (eg. sorting cause-of-death distributions to a few bins like "infant", "child", "adult", "elder").by Sharlin
- All babies were exclusively breastfed in 3064 BCE.by spullara
- > The household he was born into lived on roughly $3.04 a day per person in today's money
Go back not even that far and money comparisons like this make no sense. A family subsistence farming doesn't have the same kind of relationship we do with money. Also they couldn't really go down the shops. Existence was in the edge for everyone, even the wealthy.
The other problem I see is that it's seems to pick a random time before a random location. So this will favour the times when there were far fewer people. No way around this, you either end up picking mostly near modern times because that's when the bulk of the people lived, or people further back in time who are pretty disconnected from our modern society.
by jemmyw - I am really happy to live in the modern age. It is quite amazing to think that people are facing cardiovascular disease and cancer instead of random parasites nowadays. Modern medicine is such a miracle.by xiaoyu2006
- How many random parasites has modern medicine removed from you? Likely you never even had one. It's not just medicine, we also have abundant, safe food, clean water and warm housingby Perz1val
- > instead of random parasites nowadays
Maybe MAHA will bring this back, like they did measles.
by thoman23 - Her farthest journey was a day's walk, to a nearby market town.
I think this is what boggles my mind most about antiquity: the vast majority of people rarely ventured much past where they were born (unless they did a likely once in a lifetime religious pilgrimage which took the better part of a year).
Seeing as most other people didn't venture further either, you really got to know the people around you very well. Common life limitations simply precluded much travel. The only foreigners you saw were either invading hordes, or traders who were constantly on the road.
by lr4444lr - My grandmother told a story about meeting an elderly female relative in Kingston, Tasmania, soon after my grandparents had got their first car. After visiting, they said they were now going back to the city (Hobart), and the old lady said, "Oh, how lovely, I've never been!" My grandmother reported, "And I should have told her 'get in the car then!', because she died not too long after."
Kingston is 13 kilometers from Hobart.
- I think it's the other way around. Without the cultural norms around impersonal markets, you have to rely on your extended family network or clan for everything, because there is no trust otherwise. This is what keeps you from traveling. If you were trying to trade with a far-away stranger, why should they not just rob you instead? Nobody is around to punish. And for all they know, you were just as likely trying to poison them rather than make a fair trade.by Matumio
- There were and have always been trading and other exchanges all over the world. The Egtved girl was traveling from north to central Germany, probably for marriage. Now, if we mean most people did not do this, then sure. But there's a persistent idea that ancient cultures were not in contact with each other, and this is largely disproven.by Exoristos
- We might recognize that the economics of making such a fascinating and artful experiment like this have completely changed. No ads. Not asking for anything except your attention, and then delivering an outcome that is fascinating and honestly, far beyond what a person would be incentivized to build before AI tooling.
I loved it and feel inspired from it.
(It looks like it's getting a lot of traffic and might get hugged to death)
by bentt - But its just AI slop though. None of the data is real. It's completely made up. There is nothing interesting about this.by backlava12
- Both of these things can be true. It's a really good idea that immediately led me to another idea to play with. But it hallucinates so its accuracy can't be trusted.by GrinningFool
- > We might recognize that the economics of making such a fascinating and artful experiment like this have completely changed.
And this is not limited to software development. In just a few years, the economics of delivering healthcare, education, entertainment and legal services are going to change completely. Transportation is changing as we speak. In a decade Physical AI will completely change the economics of manufacturing, food services, elder care, and so on.
The post-scarcity world will be here sooner than we think!
by petilon - I also think this shows what the changed economics do: it allows anyone to fill the web with convincing looking nonsense.
The person who built this did not have to put in months to build a cool web app. But they also did not have to put in months of research, gathering representative pictures. And they didn't. Instead they let a software create a well presented nonsense story about a boy from Anatolia in 200 BCE called Mehmet wearing a parka.
by cedilla - > No ads. Not asking for anything except your attention, and then delivering an outcome that is fascinating and honestly, far beyond what a person would be incentivized to build before AI tooling.
I don't think I agree. There were plenty of interesting side-projects on the internet before AI.
I'm not sure why AI means that people don't need to support their creations with ads. Sure, it probably took fewer human-hours typing at a keyboard to create this, but for things like this, a labor of love, that's typically not the "expensive" part.
by pavel_lishin - My daughter is four.
I drew a boy who lived 11000 years ago in Mexico.
His longest travel was a half day walk carried by his family to a nearby foraging ground.
He died at 4 from a zoonotic fever. Both parents outlived him.
It’s random, it’s ai generated. Makes me appreciate life nevertheless.
by jorisboris - I had a similar sensation. I often think about a friend of mine who mentioned, in passing, a sense of having won the lottery of life for being born in this day and age, in a first-world countryby zabriel_goss
- yeah, and you don't have to go back that far
last night my wife and I were watching the first episode of a TV show Deadwood (set in the Dakotas in late 1800s), and my wife commented "I could never have lived then; I would have just killed myself immediately". The irony of course is that she would have been fine had she been born in that era as it would have appeared as "normal" to her then as the world today appears to us (ok things aren't normal right now, but I mean comparatively speaking), and "better" than 100 years earlier.
- I drew Vuk,a boy who lived in the 13th century Balkans. He died at 2. His dad was already gone. According to the statistics the life expectancy at birth for him was around 50%. I suspect a lot of our random people would have died early, if they were born before the 19th or 20th century...
- Yeah same, I drew a girl from the Nile Valley in 1100, and I redrew her life a few times and got my daughter's name and my nieces name. "Daughter" died at child birth and "Niece" died of dysentery at age 4... real niece is turning 4 soon.
I quit the app after that.
by abustamam