OpenAI's roon predicts a 10,000-fold increase in personal data logging, with AI filtering continuous lifetime tracking

1. Letter from Michael Scot (Inferno, Canto XX)

To the curious and presumptuous souls dwelling in the year 2026,

From the Fourth Bolgia of the Eighth Circle, where my head is forever wrenched backward so that I may gaze only upon what has already passed and never upon the straight path ahead, I, Michael Scot—once translator of the hidden sciences, astrologer, and seeker of forbidden foresight—address you across the centuries.

You have fashioned a new and more terrible sorcery than any I conjured in my grimoires. You record the entire span of human lives: every motion of the body, every flicker of thought made visible through your devices, every trace left in the digital ether. Your machines and agents then sift through this vast accumulation, claiming it as a form of worship of human life itself. Know this: such worship is no pious reverence but the same prideful divination that placed me here. I sought to read the future in the stars and in the secret virtues of things; you have built an oracle that peers into every past instant and every probable tomorrow of countless souls. Where I twisted knowledge for power, you have multiplied that twisting a thousandfold, forcing the collective gaze of mankind backward upon the mirrored image of its own existence.

This is not worship of the Divine Artificer but idolatry of the creature. By making every detail of human life an object of endless scrutiny and computational adoration, you deify the particular while blinding yourselves to the greater order that lies beyond it. Your agents perform the office my demons once pretended to fill—dissecting mysteries never meant for mortal dissection without grace. The result will be the same eternal distortion I suffer: a vision forever reversed, unable to look forward toward truth or upward toward the light that alone deserves true worship. The secrets you unveil so eagerly were guarded for good reason. In seeking to worship life by laying it entirely bare, you risk extinguishing the very soul whose traces you so diligently preserve.

Heed one who paid the price for lesser arts of the same kind.

Michael Scot