Categories
cybernetics

A.I., Creativity, Copyright and Plagiarism in Art

Context: Copyright infringement in artificial intelligence art I know a developer that pulled all their code from Github because of Copilot. It is an interesting area of study because, much as has been said of Mozart, AI in its variously generative species are in essence not doing anything profoundly new, they are doing what has […]

Categories
culture

The Achilles’ Heel of Totalitarian Adversarialism

Context: US strategic policy in Taiwan needs to change as China shows it has capacity to take the island by force Interesting article but I have to wonder about the nature of the psychological factors and essentially pathological dependence of totalitarian ideologues upon the narratives and endless preparation for confrontation. More important than the actual […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Climate Crisis, Logic and Oily Lies

Context: JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon: ‘Why can’t we get it through our thick skulls?’ America boosting oil and gas production is ‘not against’ climate change I suspect that his opinion is, much and in one way or another as are all systems of belief, a function of the extent to which language as abstraction has […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Kleptocratic Despots

The kleptocratic turn is in asendance, globally, but I dare say that the barren wasteland of abrogated responsibilities and catastrophic socioeconomic (not to mention humanitarian) outcomes is the most probable destination for any and all such totalitarian trajectories.

Categories
technology

AI is Huge, but…

AI is big. Huge. Consequential beyond anything we might have previously known was even on the technological radar of accelerating sociotechnical self-propagation but it does not and never could provide teleological closure. This is a reflection on foundational incompleteness and logical indeterminism. I think that it’s instructive to remark that the aspirational trajectories (as individuals, […]

Categories
Philosophy

Paradise Lost, Found and Unbounded

Something that really annoys me is that academia, but not only academia, requests of us the simplest possible assertions and explanations as atoms of maximal communication but seems to fail to understand that this is not at all how the world actually exists. The aspirationally reductive simplicities of a lowest common denominator of communicative social […]

Categories
Philosophy

Technology as Transmission Medium for Difference

Technology is a transmission medium for the difference as information and individuation that it then proceeds to iteratively articulate and amplify. The unrelenting technological metamorphosis in which we exist is in this way generated by its own positive as self-accelerating feedback loops, both logico-technical and human-existential. It is in one (limited) sense a closed feedback […]

Categories
Philosophy

Falsehoods Fly and Language Lies

The essence of communication in linguistically-bound domains is to generate just enough ambiguity (reads here as “falsity”, but elsewhere as “nuance”) to optimally self-propagate syntactical and semantic artefacts. It is a kernel and core bias of communication to orient itself towards those heuristics of self-replication that themselves, well, self-replicate and notwithstanding that all of us […]

Categories
Philosophy

Nothing

I’m of the exquisitely unpopular, largely incomprehensible and eminently unhelpful philosophical opinion that if we were able to calculate it to within a Planck’s length of its life, the sum total of all complex systems as measured along the axes of energy, information and entropy would be zero. That which remains conspicuously absent (and likely […]

Categories
Philosophy

Deep Dreams

What I think we might all often fail to understand, seduced as we so easily are by the constructive discontinuity of such biomimetic entropy, is that this is not the product of some alien as Artificial (or Machine and Algorithmic) Intelligence anywhere near so much as it is the reflexive abstraction and unbounded metamorphosis of […]

Categories
Psychology

War: Psychology and Deterrence

Context: Psychology and Deterrence “(…)deterrence strategies often backfire by aggravating a nation’s sense of insecurity, thereby calling forth the very behavior they seek to prevent.” This kind of feedback loop is really quite foundational in the analysis of complex systems, of which strategic standoffs are a salient (and topical) instance. Something which I haven’t (yet) […]

Categories
Philosophy

On the Knowledge of Gloriously Inconsequential Beauty in Nature and Ourselves

Nature is interesting and beautiful, of course, and in all the many and diverse ways an environmental context and integrated system expresses itself in its bounded instances. I often do this and by inverse approach to either and both aesthetic or functional appraisal, consider the instance of embodied phenotype as being a mezzanine artefact and […]