This is neat, but I don't think it's actually drawing the year from the correct probability distribution - "a random birth is far more likely to fall near the present" is correct, but in 5 "random" choices, only one was from anywhere near modern day.
I did a statistical analysis and you are correct. The issue seems to be that crude birth rates from around 500CE and earlier are overestimated significantly. The bad source seems to be Kaneda & Haub, "How Many People Have Ever Lived on Earth?", where they assume a flat crude birth rate of 80 for all BCE dates. The probability distribution is just a function of pop and CBR, so it results in significantly decreasing modern birth probabilities.
There are more statistical issues. I drew a person from 1984, living in Germany and recalculated their life several times. In almost all cases, their mother died while they were in their thirties, often both parents. This is simply far from reality.
The x-axis being log scale by default visually exadurates the effect if you are thinking about it in terms of area under the curve. This confused me also.
> "a random birth is far more likely to fall near the present" is correct,
If the selection is from the population at random (as the UI indicates), but it specifically says it's based on a random year (during which humans were present) first as a filter. It's much more likely to select far from the population explosion.
I guess you are right, but it makes it more interesting if the picks are not almost all from the recent past. On the other hand, I would also guess that spreading the picks evenly across the time range might result in many being from times with little data to differentiate them.
It makes the premise of the entire site flawed, though. And it defeats the purpose of the convenient button provided to redraw a year. That is what should allow you to find a pick that might be more interesting, rather than messing up the randomness promised by the site and the HN title.
How near is near? With ~100 billion people having ever lived, the odds of a randomly selected life falling within the past couple of centuries are not all that high.
Could you be a little more specific? https://www.prb.org/news/how-many-people-have-ever-lived-on-... puts the halfway point at over 2,000 years ago, so you'd expect less than 50% probability of getting a random year that's not BCE. "A random birth is far more likely to fall near the present" is true in relative terms; the timeline on the web site goes back 300,000 years and you're very likely to get something in the past few thousand years, which is pretty near to the present when compared to a third of a million years. The random years it gives me fit into that pretty well, so I guessed that the person I replied to might be using a narrower definition of "anywhere near modern day" than that. Hence why I asked. If I missed something, could you kindly point out what I missed, instead of whatever this is?
The life template kinda breaks down if you land in a modern era which makes me think it's probably equally as silly sounding to apply it to a hypothetical life from 10k years ago.
But I guess it's inevitable when you try to paint individual lives through pure statistics.
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)
> 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.
I think it's just that in the past, you would need X free time, Y motivation level, and Z skill level (partly tradeable for X and Y) to create something like this, and now all of those values are smaller. So it's 'economics' in the straightforward sense, because not everyone could afford to spend X hours on something they weren't going to monetize, and also in the sense of the incentives shaping people's productive/creative activity.
(As for whether it's a good thing, I'm conflicted. It's cool to see more stuff like this, but if it crowds out the more intense passion projects, we lose something too.)
I believe that part serves to emphasize the main point.
To elucidate for this particular example, before AI agents existed, projects with this level of data and depth might've needed to be monetized in order to justify the resources to bring it to life.
Now that the barrier is much lower, the creator didn't mind spinning up and providing it with no monetization (e.g. no ads).
> before AI agents existed, projects with this level of data and depth might've needed to be monetized in order to justify the resources to bring it to life.
The site was registered a month ago. If it ever actually gets and stays popular, see if it has no ads then. The economics of personal interest sites didn't change in the sense that they're any harder to make now compared to the mid-90s. The economics that changed is the Internet now has billions of users and attention being monetized can make you a lot richer now than then. It's very hard for people to see an opportunity to become a multi-millionaire by clicking a button but then not do it because they'd rather maintain a slightly better experience for their audience.
It's, of course, not even loading right now, which gets at the other problem with this "economics" framing. The biggest expense in running an actually popular website isn't creating and publishing the first version. It's paying for the infrastructure to serve a meaningful proportion of the entire world. This is clearly not a static site. It's presumably doing some computation on the server side to draw from all these hundreds of different probability distributions that works well enough for a few dozen simultaneous requests but not thousands. There might even be some kind of perverse anti-economics going on here where thought devoted upfront to efficiency and architecture might have made this far more scalable, but the "publish the first thing that passes a basic sanity check" vibe-slop ethos doesn't usually get you that.
> 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!
In 10 years? I predict that healthcare, education, legal services and transporation won't change in a meaningful way at all. People will go to a doctor, kids will attend school and aim to graduate, legal services will still be done by lawyers and decided in court. Transportation will still depend largely on what exists right now or is being built right now. There won't be self-driving cars in every city, only in a few, probably more in the US and China, fewer in Europe, probably close to zero in the rest of the world.
And how do you think will the post-scarcity affect the daily lives of most people? My prediction is that most people even in 30 years will still work for a wage, and probably still around 30-40 hours per week, because these gains of post-scarcity won't be distributed evenly. It will mostly make a few people very very rich.
> In 10 years? I predict that healthcare, education, legal services and transportation won't change in a meaningful way at all.
"We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten." -- Bill Gates, in The Road Ahead.
We are not in a scarcity world. Or it's deliberated scarcity. We have way enough means to educate, heal, feed and transport everyone. Yet most of the world work full time to produce more and more of meaningless products, and to make the economic curves go up. Also, a huge part of the population is still poor, while the rich people get richer. And on us dooms the perspective of an extreme climate crisis.
I don't know how you can think that AI or "Physical AI" will solve any of that without a really huge shift in our locals and worldwide politics. It will probably cause a massive economical crisis before anything else of importance.
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.
I was thinking along the same lines as I was going person to person in the app. It made me more disgusted at MAGA and MAHA. These guys are living in modern times with access to things that people back then couldn't even possibly dream of. The thing that really drove it home is the life expectancy of the people that came up in the draw. Most died by their 30s and some even before their 30s, most never knew their parents as they died when people were single digits of age, and they were forced to live very simple life with simple foods and conveniences.
So much of what we have has been brought to us thanks to ubiquitous fuel, ubiquitous technology, and institutions that took centuries to form and solidify. All of this built on the backs of people who sacrifiec and sometimes did horrendus things to allow us to be in the places we are. There's just so much hubris and misunderstanding of what they have been given in their lives that they don't appreciate. Pissing all this away is fine to them. Yes, I get it...they didn't get the same quality of life as their parents did(who came of age in an abberation).
What they don't realize is that it could get much worse. Many of them may not even live to see how bad it could get. This is so frustrating, and it just increases my disrespect for them.
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 housing
Yes! I think it’s really easy for us to take for granted the long list of incredible things we take for granted. Every time I hear someone lament how horrible the world is today, I wonder when they’d rather have been born. Especially as a random human like this.
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.
The life expectancy of a person who lives to 18 increases dramatically across the board.
You even see this today. If you live to 70, you can expect to live 14 to 17 more years. So to about 84 on the short side and 87 on the long side.
However, make it to 75, your life expectancy is 11 to 14 years. Which is 86 on the short side and 89 on the long side.
Basically, the longer you live, the longer you should live, but eventually the range collapses. And that's because people come in under the average all the time. Some people die at 71. And those people stop getting counted when determining life expectancy at 75.
Right, that 42% dying before age 5 means the survivors typically lived well beyond 28. There weren’t a huge number of people living into their 80s, but 28 wouldn’t have been “old man” territory.
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...
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.
"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...
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").
"He died of dysentery in the first days of life. His body was laid in a stone cist or a great urn beneath a ring of boulders, with iron tools and black-and-red pots."
Now this is fun vibe coding. A fascinating way of reckoning with our cosmic luck. On "only the first roll counts" rules, I rolled a girl who died at 8 months from a respiratory infection in the Indus valley, in 7785 BCE (9,810 years ago).
I rolled again, of course, but at that point it feels like fishing for a best case scenario. But I at least got someone from the North China Plain in 75 BCE who lived to 74 and had 6 grand children. Married at 19 and stayed married to age 71. Hard to hope for better than that, against these odds at least.
Edit: Obviously progress isn't inevitable, and at any point in time you can be unlucky. But it does seem like, for most points in history, you would rather be you, in your version of the present, than a randomly rolled person from any prior point of history leading up to your moment.
So most of the time, anyone playing this would feel more lucky to be themselves than any of the options they would have to roll for. Maybe if a version of this was offered to people 10,000 years from now they would say "crap, I rolled 2026".
I was so lucky! One lived to 35 in the Paris basin a few thousand years ago, the other lived to 25 in China, died in 1945. Both were married and left living children!
I think graph being log makes it a little hard to understand that the median birth year was around 2000 years ago. On the graph that is in the flat part but the flat part was a really, really long time.
It's funny to pick a birth year from our era and think of how history will represent us:
Martha was born in the countryside near Short Pump, in 1993 CE. Her village holds about 300 people. She makes her home in a timber-framed detached house. Martha has neither brothers nor sisters. She eats mostly wheat bread and maize, pork and dairy, and potatoes and garden vegetables, with apples in season, and coffee, soft drinks and snack foods too. She knows her letters. Her height is about 171 cm (5 ft 7 in).
An “Eastern Woodlands” person born 1989 is recorded to have experienced a “volcanic winter” and “dimmed sky” at age 2 as a result of the eruption of Mount Pinatubo.
This is an… interesting contextualization.
I am wondering how many historical situations are sexed up to be something significant, yet were nothing to write home about in the moment. All it took was a historian with an active imagination to bring it to the forefront.
In 429 CE, Devadatta was born on the Deccan Plateau, near present-day Hyderabad. His hamlet was home to about 100 people. Among six children, he was the second. Devadatta died of neonatal tetanus or sepsis within days of birth.
Before clicking, I said to myself "Indian peasant".
> You have drawn a girl, born in the Ganges Plain in 1628 CE.
> She was born, married at 16, lost her mother at 19, was orphaned at 30, had 8 children, and died at 39 of pneumonic plague, with 6 surviving children.
Nailed it. Though in retrospect, I drew really well. It would have been safer to guess "toddler death".
I was wondering if the generated people “fill up a spot” and temporarily change the stats for generating new lives. Eg, if the app already generated 10M stories, is it still using the same initial distribution for the new ones, or is generation conditioned on the stats of the already generated?
Since this website has information about how many children born per woman, and how many survive on average, I would like to see a tool that, given a particular person, can estimate how many people today are their genetic descendant.
After having my first child (a girl who is now nearly 3 years old) these stats impact me so much more. My first roll was a girl in the Iraniam plateau in the 18 century who had a 33% chance of dying before they reached 5. She managed to live to 70 but experience so much death in her life.
I can't imagine my daughter dying before she reaches 5, it feels like it would be the worst feeling I could possibly imagine and then some.
Visit any older cemetery and look for the tiny headstones and the matching very brief lifespans, or read an older obituary for someone from your great-grandparent's generation or further back, or watch a couple of seasons of _Call the Midwife_.
"A girl was born in 1276 BCE, on the Deccan Plateau, near present-day Hyderabad... She lived on a labourer's wage"
Wage labor didn't exist yet and the cited source is for labor history between 1500CE and the present.
The AI illustration also doesn't make any sense for the period.
This is the genuinely bad kind of slop because it's pretending to be semi-factual.
I wrote a short story based on a similar scenario. (Caveat, I did it with AI help, but my ideas and many iterations and me doing final editing to get it the way I want).
Without wishing to be unkind, this reads a lot more as 'one-shot with AI' than 'many iterations'; if you truly did that much editing, you didn't put it where it showed.
You've got all the AI favourite names and rhythms at once in the second paragraph, for example.
Yeah, I think the AI probably shows. But in fact it is the result of many iterations.
But what I was trying to get across are the ideas, not the language. I think it you were to read the whole thing, you'd probably find it interesting. But if not, feel free to let me know.
But my hypothesis is that there are people with skills for ideas that have the potential to be interesting stories, but not necessarily great prose skills; I don't think those necessarily line up in the same person. Up until now, to write a worthwhile short story you had to be among the best at both.
Maybe AI can help change that, and maybe (I hypothesize), that would be for the better. I understand that such a hypothesis would be controversial, but to me, it feels worth exploring.
an effective way to glean a little slice of understanding of the human experience throughout the ages, though 'every human never' might be more apt a name as its all statistics from the demographics to the generative portrait
Yes, but I definitely think the probabilities are off - the explanation, which I agree with, states "a random birth is far more likely to fall near the present."
But it appears to be drawing much more uniformly from the years than you'd expect given the probability curve (population curve) pictured.
Bear in mind that the population curve defaults to a log scale on the year axis. If you switch it over to linear, that big fat area at the end shrinks to a needle-like spike..
> You have drawn a girl, born in the Levant in 1042 CE.
> She was born, married at 18, had 4 children, lost her mother at 28, was orphaned at 41, was widowed at 70, and died at 71 of heart failure (degenerative illness), with 3 surviving children and 9 grandchildren.
First try. Honestly I'm going to call this a W under the circumstances.
Herodotus used the term Palaistine in his work The Histories in the 5th century BCE. The earliest written record of the word "Judea" is from extra-biblical writings from 733 BCE.
The most "official" designation was arguably when the Roman's designated Syria Palaestina in 135 CE
We can call them flat birthers
If the selection is from the population at random (as the UI indicates), but it specifically says it's based on a random year (during which humans were present) first as a filter. It's much more likely to select far from the population explosion.
But I guess it's inevitable when you try to paint individual lives through pure statistics.
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.
And I suppose other RPGs, too, especially ones that are more story-than-dice driven, and/or set in the "real" world.
I loved it and feel inspired from it.
(It looks like it's getting a lot of traffic and might get hugged to death)
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.
This is a strawman.
The original point was "the economics ... have changed"
I read this as, it's much easier to spin up a project of this scale even non-monetized, and more people are able and willing to do so.
(As for whether it's a good thing, I'm conflicted. It's cool to see more stuff like this, but if it crowds out the more intense passion projects, we lose something too.)
To elucidate for this particular example, before AI agents existed, projects with this level of data and depth might've needed to be monetized in order to justify the resources to bring it to life.
Now that the barrier is much lower, the creator didn't mind spinning up and providing it with no monetization (e.g. no ads).
Yes, this was exactly what I meant in OP.
It's, of course, not even loading right now, which gets at the other problem with this "economics" framing. The biggest expense in running an actually popular website isn't creating and publishing the first version. It's paying for the infrastructure to serve a meaningful proportion of the entire world. This is clearly not a static site. It's presumably doing some computation on the server side to draw from all these hundreds of different probability distributions that works well enough for a few dozen simultaneous requests but not thousands. There might even be some kind of perverse anti-economics going on here where thought devoted upfront to efficiency and architecture might have made this far more scalable, but the "publish the first thing that passes a basic sanity check" vibe-slop ethos doesn't usually get you that.
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!
And how do you think will the post-scarcity affect the daily lives of most people? My prediction is that most people even in 30 years will still work for a wage, and probably still around 30-40 hours per week, because these gains of post-scarcity won't be distributed evenly. It will mostly make a few people very very rich.
"We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten." -- Bill Gates, in The Road Ahead.
I don't know how you can think that AI or "Physical AI" will solve any of that without a really huge shift in our locals and worldwide politics. It will probably cause a massive economical crisis before anything else of importance.
I think some number are of by a magnitude (DIED BEFORE AGE 5: 4%, for Scandinavium in 1990 - according to UN it’s ~0.6%).
Maybe MAHA will bring this back, like they did measles.
So much of what we have has been brought to us thanks to ubiquitous fuel, ubiquitous technology, and institutions that took centuries to form and solidify. All of this built on the backs of people who sacrifiec and sometimes did horrendus things to allow us to be in the places we are. There's just so much hubris and misunderstanding of what they have been given in their lives that they don't appreciate. Pissing all this away is fine to them. Yes, I get it...they didn't get the same quality of life as their parents did(who came of age in an abberation).
What they don't realize is that it could get much worse. Many of them may not even live to see how bad it could get. This is so frustrating, and it just increases my disrespect for them.
for now
>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.
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.
The life expectancy of a person who lives to 18 increases dramatically across the board.
You even see this today. If you live to 70, you can expect to live 14 to 17 more years. So to about 84 on the short side and 87 on the long side.
However, make it to 75, your life expectancy is 11 to 14 years. Which is 86 on the short side and 89 on the long side.
Basically, the longer you live, the longer you should live, but eventually the range collapses. And that's because people come in under the average all the time. Some people die at 71. And those people stop getting counted when determining life expectancy at 75.
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"
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...
"He died of dysentery in the first days of life. His body was laid in a stone cist or a great urn beneath a ring of boulders, with iron tools and black-and-red pots."
I rolled again, of course, but at that point it feels like fishing for a best case scenario. But I at least got someone from the North China Plain in 75 BCE who lived to 74 and had 6 grand children. Married at 19 and stayed married to age 71. Hard to hope for better than that, against these odds at least.
Edit: Obviously progress isn't inevitable, and at any point in time you can be unlucky. But it does seem like, for most points in history, you would rather be you, in your version of the present, than a randomly rolled person from any prior point of history leading up to your moment.
So most of the time, anyone playing this would feel more lucky to be themselves than any of the options they would have to roll for. Maybe if a version of this was offered to people 10,000 years from now they would say "crap, I rolled 2026".
Edit 2: I think the death hug might have got it.
probably like 5% of humanity has his genes now. that was fun vibe coding
Martha was born in the countryside near Short Pump, in 1993 CE. Her village holds about 300 people. She makes her home in a timber-framed detached house. Martha has neither brothers nor sisters. She eats mostly wheat bread and maize, pork and dairy, and potatoes and garden vegetables, with apples in season, and coffee, soft drinks and snack foods too. She knows her letters. Her height is about 171 cm (5 ft 7 in).
This is an… interesting contextualization.
I am wondering how many historical situations are sexed up to be something significant, yet were nothing to write home about in the moment. All it took was a historian with an active imagination to bring it to the forefront.
Hardcore
> You have drawn a girl, born in the Ganges Plain in 1628 CE.
> She was born, married at 16, lost her mother at 19, was orphaned at 30, had 8 children, and died at 39 of pneumonic plague, with 6 surviving children.
Nailed it. Though in retrospect, I drew really well. It would have been safer to guess "toddler death".
Extra points if you can take your example life off grid.
https://youtube.com/shorts/CssbcJ44dos
Very cool project
I was wondering if the generated people “fill up a spot” and temporarily change the stats for generating new lives. Eg, if the app already generated 10M stories, is it still using the same initial distribution for the new ones, or is generation conditioned on the stats of the already generated?
The random life I got: https://anyhumanever.com/life/1323665477-1682995380-16357802...
Gave me a good and convincing first couple of tries. Good work.
I can't imagine my daughter dying before she reaches 5, it feels like it would be the worst feeling I could possibly imagine and then some.
Wage labor didn't exist yet and the cited source is for labor history between 1500CE and the present. The AI illustration also doesn't make any sense for the period.
This is the genuinely bad kind of slop because it's pretending to be semi-factual.
yourlifeunderrome.com
Somebody, somewhere, somewhen rolled the dice and here we are.
https://garyrobinson.net/2026/08/18/everyone-who-will-ever-b...
You've got all the AI favourite names and rhythms at once in the second paragraph, for example.
But what I was trying to get across are the ideas, not the language. I think it you were to read the whole thing, you'd probably find it interesting. But if not, feel free to let me know.
But my hypothesis is that there are people with skills for ideas that have the potential to be interesting stories, but not necessarily great prose skills; I don't think those necessarily line up in the same person. Up until now, to write a worthwhile short story you had to be among the best at both.
Maybe AI can help change that, and maybe (I hypothesize), that would be for the better. I understand that such a hypothesis would be controversial, but to me, it feels worth exploring.
og/goat demo of synthetic data gen
only nit is 'draw' button often below the fold
Had to laugh.
But it appears to be drawing much more uniformly from the years than you'd expect given the probability curve (population curve) pictured.
Great, let's bring back smallpox and measles because the US elected officials are too dumb or genuinely want to destroy the world.
Modern take on Oregon Trail vibes I like it
> She was born, married at 18, had 4 children, lost her mother at 28, was orphaned at 41, was widowed at 70, and died at 71 of heart failure (degenerative illness), with 3 surviving children and 9 grandchildren.
First try. Honestly I'm going to call this a W under the circumstances.
The most "official" designation was arguably when the Roman's designated Syria Palaestina in 135 CE
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Palestine