Notes on leaving the academy, hearing voices, and following a trail.
Stephen Mucher, Ph.D. · Founder, Sondage
When I left UCLA last year I was ready for a break. A real break. In May I put on a backpack and started walking. From the Mexican border, I set out on a hike that would take me nearly six months and more than 2,600 miles to Canada on the Pacific Crest Trail.
I left behind my university colleagues, a rewarding deanship, and the remarkable people at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute. But I longed for time to reflect, and I recognized that the daily discussions about AI, especially, had weighed on me. On the trail, off the grid, immersed in a quirky hiker subculture, the conversations differed dramatically. On summits and at watering holes we celebrated our place in nature, shared perspectives on the limitations of modern technology, and learned from each other’s spirit of generosity. We marveled at our own physical achievement and eagerly anticipated the remaining challenges. Only weeks earlier I had been sitting in a climate-controlled office rehashing what AI can do and why we need it. On the trail, in the wild, my peers routinely reminded me what humans can do and why we need them.
I carried a small audio recorder. Somewhere outside the Mojave I began stopping the hikers I met with a question. Is the trail an extension of the life you live, or a break from it? The community gave me a trail name: “Verbatim.” By the time I reached the Cascades I had recorded more than a hundred responses. Not exactly oral history, but an informal snapshot—a fellow human, in nature, deep in thought.
My simple question was met with surprise, then delight. You can hear it in the tapes. It is the kind of question that sneaks up on you. You don’t know the answer until you start talking. I now know that the question gave me a small archive, a cache of primary sources, and precisely the kind of human artifact we will need in the emerging age of synthetic content.
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That hike, and the tapes, set the stage for what I am doing now. I embarked knowing that AI is a powerful, potentially transformative new development. But as a humanist, historian, and naturalist, I remain far more interested in what it cannot do for us. The trail gave me time to think. And that thinking inevitably turned to how we collect, record, keep, and retell accounts of our past. I recalled just how much history is human and interpersonal. I will argue here, and in the work ahead, that a machine cannot make it.
I am a social historian and a geragogist. At UCLA I had the privilege of directing Osher and learning from modern elders, men and women in their seventies and eighties committed to reflection and growth. That group showed me, among other things, the enduring value of later-life reflection and life history documentation. On the trail I was reminded that such reflection is universal. A rite of passage. A developmental phase. A tool for spiritual integration. A season for cognitive growth and intergenerational sharing. Until recently, nearly every human culture understood, valued, ritualized, honored, and documented the knowledge that is only made possible when an elder tells their story.
I have been thinking a great deal about how historians, or our own descendants, will study us someday. If the past can teach us anything about the future, I think we can make a few predictions. First, tomorrow’s social historians will find us fascinating. They will want to know the stories and motivations of ordinary people just like you and me. Second, they will ask questions about us we have never imagined. Third, they will look for answers in sources we never expected anyone would care to read. Fourth, they will benefit from a massive archive. Unlike previous generations, we will leave a digital footprint. Curious historians will read its contents as performative, private, or mundane. They will be drawn in by the obvious: emails, text messages, social posts. And by the less predictable: medical data, GPS coordinates, video logs, web stats, dating profiles, Yelp, Uber, and Airbnb reviews. Taken together it will contain countless stories of how we lived at this pivotal moment.
To the historians of the future we will appear as the most documented generation to date, and the only generation formed both before and after the emergence of anthropomorphic AI. This makes us intriguing candidates for robust social history inquiry. But I suspect they will want to know more than our coordinates and commercial presence. Where will they go to understand our interior lives? What sources will show them how we imagined, created, or thought?
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I call this the Input Gap—the distance between our surface data and our interior lives. Large language models can scrape our public digital footprint and construct a plausible account of our lives. Our places, titles, affiliations, and public statements offer the coordinates needed to shape a basic story. In seconds, the machinery can produce a fluent biography or memoir, with or without consent, and narrate it with the confidence of an actual witness. These narratives can even mimic something deeper, but they can never truly reach the part of a life that was never externalized. The crucible moments. The decisions made in private. The meaning a person has assigned, over decades, to a particular loss, a particular faith, or a particular transition.
For most of us that material is found in only one place. It resides in the body and voice of the person who lived it. It has never been elicited, much less archived. And it won’t be unless and until someone asks.
Predicting the future like this is a strange and discomforting place for a historian. I should be living in the past. Instead I am projecting a hundred years forward. But I cannot seem to let these questions go. The trail led me here, and to Sondage, a certification and standards framework for human-conducted life history and family-level curation.
In the absence of standards, commercial heritage apps and genealogy platforms, a six-billion-dollar industry, confidently project a future they cannot deliver. These technologies increasingly, and often with ambiguous consent and little transparency, use AI to collect and interpret personal histories. They promise a polished book or video or website in return and call it history. They now engage in something I have described elsewhere as auto-autobiography, the life story that appears to write itself.
Sondage takes a different approach. Put plainly, the Sondage Standard asserts that any account of the human past interpreted without humans—and therefore lacking embodiment, accountability, and transparency—is something other than “history.” Our standards and practices are built around three commitments: Human Authorship, Embodied Provenance, and Non-Custodial Sovereignty. In short, Sondage is a response to what I call the Authentication Horizon, the point past which authentic and synthetic biographical source material become formally indistinguishable in the archive.
Sondage, in French, means a sounding, the careful measurement a ship takes in murky waters. Archaeologists use the term to describe a test dig. I think of Sondage in ways that bring these meanings together. Sondage is a purposeful assessment, a sample, a preliminary and admittedly incomplete inquiry, designed to help us make better decisions when the future seems most uncertain.
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The growth of commercial genealogy and family history tools points to a deep yearning. It taps a longing in older adults to make meaning of their lives and tell their story. It speaks to families who want to know a lineage and relate to their past in deeply personal ways. Silicon Valley sells subscriptions and products that trade on these instincts. But in using AI to collect and retell family history, these emerging products treat historical research as a burden that can and should be alleviated, rather than a puzzle that requires reflection, analysis, and an evolving interpretation. I remain optimistic that our time-consuming inquiry into family history, conducted with embodied curiosity and methodological integrity, will only become more valuable in the years ahead. And it will present a unique chance to assert our humanity.
Ordinary people who want their story collected, told, and preserved deserve human alternatives to commercial heritage apps. Those alternatives will prove essential, and produce meaning for historians and descendants alike, because they are the only way to elicit and document a person’s inner life authentically. Sondage was created to offer an alternative.
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I ended the trail in the sublime northern Cascades and stayed. Seattle is now home. This fall I am in New York at Cornell Tech’s Digital Life Initiative, which examines the societal implications of digital technology—ethics, policy, politics, and quality of life. At Cornell I am considering how commercial AI heritage products and auto-autobiography affect the way older adults recall, retell, archive, and make meaning of their personal history. The questions run from memory and cognitive offloading to historiography and later-life loneliness.
The Manhattan skyline looks nothing like the Pacific Crest Trail. But I am still walking here, still finding fellow travelers, and still reminded of what humans can do and why we need them.
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This essay is human-authored. It appears in The Sondage Review, the publication of Sondage.
Stephen Mucher, Ph.D., is the founder of Sondage, a governance platform for scholar-guided life history recording, human-authored curation, and archival accession. He was formerly Dean and Director of the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at UCLA, an administrator at UC Berkeley, and a faculty member at Bard College. In 2025 he walked the 2,655-mile Pacific Crest Trail from Mexico to Canada, conducting one hundred audio interviews under the trail name Verbatim. He has recorded voices in more than twenty-five countries.
Photo. National Panasonic RQ-421S portable cassette recorder, circa 1973–1975. Image via Getty Images (licensed).
