Context: Annual index finds AI is ‘industrializing’ but needs better metrics and testing If an intractable problem in any such rapidly-evolving technological or regulatory frame of reference is that an accelerating pace of change at least partially invalidates models, axioms and assumptions before they have ever even been operationalised, then we find ourselves (yet again) staring […]
Category: culture
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Democracy Oscillates
Context: Math explains polarization, and it’s not just about politics The mathematics indicates aspects of causal necessity, perhaps, in dynamical systems but we might turn to a complementary psychological ontology of polarisation, Othering and system differentiation. A partisan point of view (or mind and associated political, ideological subjectivity) is always and already inversely anchored and […]
Is China Taking the Lead in AI?
Context: Is China Taking the Lead in AI? I guess it really depends on what we consider progress to be and in what ways such progress is substantive and meaningful or superficial and fragile. It may be an undeniable fact that competition and adversarial sabre-rattling is as profoundly and normatively written into our modern psyches […]
On Moral Machines and Embodied Biases
Context: The Appearance of Robots Affects Our Perception of the Morality of Their Decisions Curious: “People consider moral decisions made by humanoid robots to be less ethically sound than when another human or traditional-looking robot makes the same decision.” The uncanny valley rides again. This is a particular instance of a general principle. The apperception […]
AI: Dispatches from a metal mind
Relatively recent and unexpected career changes have found me up to my armpits in the swiftly-flowing waters and complex technologies of machine learning and artificial intelligence. I am utterly fascinated by the many and diverse ways in which we seek to replicate our own cognition and even while we must at some level know that […]
Beautiful Words and Emptiness
I enjoy the endless Baroque complexity of words far too much to ever settle on a generalised shape or articulated pattern and causal ontology for them. Of course, though, even the absence of pattern is a kind of pattern, no? By this logic we might even assert that the intricate improbability of a truly random […]