Context: Banksy shredded artwork Love is in the Bin sells for artist’s record, which is 20 times more than its pre-shredded price The most consequential information artefacts, entities and systems are those which generate, as conceptual heredity, further artefacts, entities and systems – open and unbounded without closure. What we see in Banksy’s stunt is […]
Indeed, and similarly – the metric and ticking metronome of those times is so often and deeply inflected by a chronology (as history) measured in, by and as reflexive institutional responses to human being that we have all come to quite normatively expect that all of our catastrophes and our triumphs must necessarily conform to […]
Context: Vulnerable machines could be smarter ones Complex systems not only natively possess but also harness, amplify and cultivate the uncertainty and ambiguity (as indefinite extensibility) that forever haunts all mechanical or, indeed, analytical approaches to emulating them. A curious symmetry exists within rationality in that it constructs its object as method of reflexive self-validation […]
Context: Guess who’s the biggest investor in self-driving tech? As a general (and perhaps self-evident) observation, note that the sum total of investment at $44 billion would achieve so much more if one company had those resources pooled but that, enigmatically, it is precisely the difference and competition which is driving the acceleration in this […]
Context: Cambridge Quantum Releases World’s First Quantum Natural Language Processing Toolkit and Library We are moving away from chatbots that intermittently hurl absurdities and misinformation at (and as each other and) the world towards autonomous language-processing systems that reason and understand. Whether or not we get there is not as important as that we invoke […]
Context: Brave new Netherlands: This Dutch AI start-up is changing healthcare Michel Foucault‘s observations on the role and nature of surveillance and knowledge were quite on point in regards to this. The nature of a disciplinary/regulatory and /or cybernetic system of social control is such that what occurs in health quickly permeates and percolates through […]
Context: Elon Musk Insists on Autonowashing, Says Tesla Will License Autonomy to Anyone Commercial value is, perhaps, always a function of the difference(s) between aspiration and reality. Marketing as entrepreneurial exercise of relatively shameless self-promotion always and already presupposes the existence of some future state and well-polished (generally Utopian) fantasy upon which narrative (and prospective […]
Facebook’s recent network faux pas and serial fall(s) from grace led to an observation of culture, technology and psychology in a world that is anything other than resilient to change or catastrophic disturbance: Human beings are never quite so happy as when they double down on unsustainable or profoundly fragile and insecure systems that can […]
It is worth noting that the pathological certainty with which tyrants assert their possession of singular truth and privileged certainty is really no less than the driving dissonance from which all human history endlessly retreats. This turbulent misanthropy compels us forward and endlessly regenerates precisely those forms of psychological and cultural insecurity which produce tyrants […]
Steven Pinker is very clever and provides resonant food for thought whenever he speaks or writes anything. The dichotomy of which he is so fond and upon which so much of his work depends – a political turn is never far from a popular work on science in his many compositions – is an instance […]
It is fascinating that human beings are in general so fixated upon provisioning plausible or compelling ontologies (of “how things are”) that they quite happily trade away their own conceptual creativity and intellectual aptitude for the lean pickings of effectively fictive narratives that rarely if ever meet anything like the lofty ambitions towards which they […]
Context: Can SenseTime become a Chinese AI champion? Success here being defined as much by the extent to which a corporation becomes a compliant appendage of state control as by technical expertise. It’s a strange game – the control systems being fielded will gradually become the axioms of political power; what is successful as applications […]
Daedelus Kite 