Context: Mind-Bending Study Suggests Time Did Actually Exist Before The Big Bang Cosmological beginnings. At least one (endless) beauty of compression to infinite density at singularity is that infinity is able to contain itself, in fact – infinitely many times. Holding back on the cognitive entropy bomb that this mathematical peculiarity represents, consider that one […]
Author: G
Oh yes, this world is a mess
Science and technology cartwheel and careen past us in ways that few can convincingly argue are fully comprehended, defined or ever anything more than superficially controlled. This accelerating turbulence of complex sociotechnical recursion and self-validating necessity is a self-propagating compression wave of information, energy, technology and concepts. It ripples and oscillates like waves on a […]
Bookstore
On yesterday’s visit to garner some domestic logistics I found myself drawn, as is quite natural for me, to a local bookstore. Rapidly yet calmly and with apposite politeness I navigated my way to the psychology and philosophy section, just next to popular science and astronomy. I tend to treat the pages of these books […]
Self-driving cars with one eye closed?
Context: Elon Musk Says Tesla’s Full-Self Driving Beta V9.0 Is Almost Ready (They are dropping the radar.) A thought that comes to mind is that of an ML system that having been trained with some static n number of streaming (sensory) data points/observations, having had the system narrow focus on less data might brute-force an […]
On Influencing Others
Context: Influencing the mind of an adversary It really makes me wonder what the future (or present) utility of statistical approaches combining neurobiological feedback orchestrated or forecasted through and as machine learning might be. The commercial extraction of utility through social media via algorithmic abbreviation and influence is clearly just such a practice. These brains […]
Agreed, on learning to learn. Recursive utility. On the (later) observations of the benefits to that learning process of competitive socioeconomic systems, as mentioned, I partially agree. A degree of competition is healthy but, invoking a general principle of recursive utility again, when competitive adversarialism becomes a goal and an end in itself – as […]
Context: How Bill Gates’ company TerraPower is building next-generation nuclear power As a general observation, *anything* which measures safety as “analyzed by deaths per unit of electricity generated” is a worry – it is a normative expectation of inevitable fatality. The technical solution described is interesting and certainly shifts the hazards and juggles the entropy […]
Context: Can you make AI fairer than a judge? Play our courtroom algorithm game Bias in AI only ever really focuses and amplifies existing inequality as a function and retrospective, combinatorial abbreviation of historical data. This itself is no great or new revelation: we generate automated decision-making systems that recursively reinforce aggregate cultural dependencies and […]
Context: How would we know if an AI is conscious? We find ourselves in an intractable ontological (as much as epistemological) bind here. If we ever get to the point of generating autonomous synthetic information-processing systems that tick all the boxes for notionally proving their possession of consciousness by whatever standard metric we might arbitrarily […]
Are Languages Intelligent Entities?
Context: Quick thoughts on GPT3 An aptitude to compose text artefacts without enduring, substantive (or perhaps any) comprehension forms the basis of many of our journeys through educational institutions. In a sense – blind rule-shuffling in context is what is requested of many if not most students in any standardised learning environment. Competency is measured […]
The discussion that no one appears willing to have is that from the very inception of these information technologies, doubt and uncertainty has been endemic and irreducible. Turing’s proof of the implicit undecidability of computation took its recursive cues from Gödel’s prime number shenanigans in the Incompleteness proof. These systems are first and foremost open […]
Universal Reboot
Context: Could We Force the Universe to Crash? If we were to take seriously the implications of much-maligned and misunderstood general principles of endemic incompleteness and uncertainty that occur both in and as distributed (“Global”) hyper-surfaces across logic, physics and mathematics, we might consider that such a cosmological “Entscheidungsproblem” is not so much fantasy as […]