Stephen Mucher is a social historian and geragogist interested in how commercial AI heritage products and auto-autobiography, the life story that appears to write itself, impact the way older adults recall, retell, archive, and make meaning of their personal history. His current projects consider impact ranging from memory to cognitive offloading to historiography to later-life loneliness. He founded Sondage, a certification and standards framework for human-conducted life history and family-level curation, which privileges embodied, accountable, human encounter over synthetic accounts of the past. Mucher is writing about the phenomenon he calls the Authentication Horizon, the point past which historical method can no longer establish whether a biographical record came from a human being in genuine encounter with a life or from a model assembling an account without one. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan and taught and held administrative appointments at Bard College and UC Berkeley before directing the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at UCLA.

Website: sondagestandard.com/standard/founder