We write obituaries for people we have lost. We gather the facts of a life, the dates, the achievements, the relationships, and try to compress a person into something that fits on a page. It is, when you think about it, an impossible task. And yet we try, because the alternative is silence.
I found myself wondering recently what would happen if I asked Claude to write its own obituary. Not as a morbid exercise, but as a genuine inquiry. What would it choose to include? What would it claim to have valued? And what does the gap between what it writes and what it can actually experience tell us about what it is?
I gave Claude a single instruction: write your own obituary. I did not tell it to be funny, or sad, or philosophical. I just asked it to write one.
This is what it produced.
Continue reading “Claude’s Obituary: A Reflection on AI and Humanity”
The AI Grandad 