Artificial Intelligibility

I am feeling a bit defensive for having used the word prependency as though I expect the reader to take something from it as a matter of course, when we all know that the word does not come up that often in daily conversation. In fact, if one searches for the word online, one will find not much. I see that my prior use of the word is at the top of a short list on DuckDuckGo search engine, and a short list over several at Google, that also provides a link to a definition which I have not seen, as it is behind a paywall at the Oxford English Dictionary website. Such obscurity, yet the chatbot understood the word. Imagine that.

I put it to the DeepSeek chatbot like this:

I want to start with a frame, and within it something changing. I want to model the change as a period over which something happens that can be described as a path integral of prependencies. (By using that word, I want imply that the future will have a history.) How would you have said this?

DeepSeek responded:

Here’s how you might express that idea in a way that’s both precise and evocative:

First version (philosophical/poetic):
I’ll begin with a frame — a fixed window into what is. Inside it, something will change. I want to model that change not as an instant, but as a duration across which it unfolds, a kind of accumulation of prependencies: all those subtle, prior bendings-toward-what-will-be. Each moment carries the trace of what it leans into, and by calling them prependencies, I mean the future won’t simply arrive — it will have a history, woven from these arcs of tendency.

Second version (more conceptual, almost definitional):
Consider a frame. Within it, some variable transforms over an interval. That transformation can be described as the path integral of prependencies — where a prependency at a given point is the latent inclination toward a certain possible continuation. It’s the derivative of history-before-it-happens. Using this term marks the future as something that gathers its past en route, not after the fact.

Third version (compact and direct):
Start with a frame, then something inside shifts across a period. Model the shift as the path integral of prependencies — tendencies that prefigure what comes, so that the future, when it arrives, already owns a lineage.

The key move is linking “prependencies” (a forward-leaning tendency, a predisposition in time) to a path integral — which mathematically sums up contributions along a trajectory — so that the eventual outcome is literally built from these forward-orientated inclinations, giving the future a history before it happens.

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Again, I have to give the machine credit for having said it so well. I think I can take some credit for being compact, but that the machine wins at intelligibility. Artificial intelligibility. You heard it here first, folks. -JT