Epilogue

One day, I was browsing at a gift shop inside the Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio in Chicago. There I saw beautiful bookmarks designed based on his art glass windows. I picked up and bought a few, one for me, others for gifts.

Then it hit me. Who uses bookmarks these days? I wondered if young generations even know what a bookmark is.

Bookmarks are physical artifacts that represent the temporary and permanence. It is an anchor that stops time and says, "I'm not finished with this thought."

In the age of AI and smartphones, words and ideas are displayed, not printed. Once you scroll your screen, it's gone, like an ephemeral spoken language, a language that leaves no trace. 

I then thought of Sanora Babb. If she did not see the sign "whose names are unknown" on a farmer's shack, the real fact of how humans were mistreated may have been lost, permanently.

You don't need a bookmark in spoken language. Native American languages are spoken without writing systems. 

During my road trip, I could not stop wondering what would have happened to the history if they had a writing system. What if they had a written record of who lived where and when, like a Japanese Koseki system? What would have happened then, when Europeans and Americans tried to take their land from them? Would they have presumed these lands as "unclaimed"?

Native Americans did not need a bookmark, and today, neither do we.

While we may not need a physical bookmark, as we build new trails using AI, we need to create a way to find meaning and permanence within the infinite scroll. We must build the logic that allows us to navigate the ephemeral and keep a record of our existence so that justice can be served.

My research on machine autonomy picked up a new meaning after the road trip.