Categories
Philosophy

Mind the Gap

Theory of Mind represents the ingestion, curated entrainment and epistemological event horizon of an essentially inarticulable metaphysical Otherness. Much is made of commercial opportunity and/or existential threat represented by artificial intelligence. I’m not sure we should be so concerned about the potential arrival of unregulated superintelligence, if indeed this does ever occur. We will remain […]

Categories
politics

Presidential Debate

Nothing quite so succinctly captures the cultural spectacle and general media Zeitgeist of jousting ideological anachronisms than does the symbolic Greco-Roman wrestling match of a contemporary Presidential political debate. Quite agnostic of personal political and/or philosophical systems of belief, I am worried by the vacuum of integrity and character on display. Having an opinion has […]

Categories
politics

Political Drift

Drift into political extremity represents the ascendance of anachronistic narrative banality masquerading as novelty, significance and exceptionalism.

Categories
technology

LLMs and Institutional Change

Current institutional angst (as sociocultural microcosm) and advice regarding the provenance of machine generated words, sentences and documents feels a little misdirective. That is, it still takes considerable intelligence and patience to extract and usefully curate prose or otherwise insightful text from these new tools. If an LLM has been used is itself neither good […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Possible Words

Asteroid City was an entertaining movie. Less roller-coaster, more linear regression but in either case and most certainly a probabilistic approximation to something inexpressible in language. A simple calculus of possibility suggests that not only are there far more meaningful sentences and thoughts than humanity might ever express, but amongst the plausibly infinite set of […]

Categories
cybernetics

World War Z: Disinformation

The soup de jour is disinformation: I found myself watching the movie World War Z (again) recently. The biological plausibility of a zombie virus that can detect and avoid sickness as a critical vulnerability and plot twist wasn’t quite enough to render the movie as being anything significantly other than “Brad Pitt saves the world, […]

Categories
Philosophy

Communicative Simplicity

Communication becomes less ambiguous and more streamlined or efficient when content aligns with dominant (as ascendant) probability distributions. This invokes communicative simplicity as a reciprocal deficit of comprehension. In this way, assurance of significance is plagued by the plausible inevitability of a proliferation of largely meaningless content.

Categories
cybernetics

Automating Healthcare?

At some point it becomes clear that automation in health and social services is grounded in a discriminating efficiency that neither assures nor necessarily sustains and guarantees affordable or ethically justifiable standards of personal care. We shouldn’t kid ourselves about the commercial motivations and political incentives that drive managerial and policy decision-making in this context. […]

Categories
cybernetics

Generative Monoculture

What, exactly, does excruciatingly monocultural generative content tell us? While satire and parody acquire significance as a function of their grounding in the consensus reality of whichever time and place they reflect, and given that sum combinatorial complexity of interdependent cultural systems is incommensurable with any bounding measures or methods and “intelligent” machines we currently […]

Categories
Philosophy

Seeding Entropy

Context: China’s spy threat is growing, but the West has struggled to keep up …oh yes, and we might also ask: to what extent is the burbling, percolating insecurity of incessant intrusion, theft and deceptive misdirection actually a necessary and sustaining precondition for the continuity of a constitutively repressive political system? Is the invocation, cultivation and […]

Categories
cybernetics

AI, Data, Antinomy, Privacy

Panopticon tesseract and the introspective self-disassembly of ubiquitous surveillance: machine intelligence does seem to find itself haunting these paraconsistent problem spaces. When presented with an enigma, I find it most instructive to find ways to augment – not diminish – the signal of antinomy. That is, let’s say the world is really just a stack […]

Categories
cybernetics

AI & Language

We are collectively navigating a technologically-mediated inflection point and communicative phase transition in which runaway acceleration of dissipative processes (i.e. explosive decompression) are dramatically reshaping how we engage with and understand humanity’s core operating system of language. AI is not simple but in this context it is simply an interface, as is intelligence. Recursively self-propagating […]