The thing about lies and falsehoods or fakes and the aggregate self-deception of contemporary technologically-mediated information landscapes is that we generally fail to acknowledge that communication has never been primarily about truth. Communication serves first and foremost as a primary mechanism and transmission medium in and as which information systems optimally self-propagate and, as fakes […]
Category: culture
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Self-identity is a Cultural Genome
Those small fragments of recombinatory information through which we understand and define ourselves and each other are nothing more or less than a patterned instance of the local, national and global cultures we inhabit and that, equally, inhabit us. In this way we are no different than the diverse and essentially narcissistic artefacts, entities and […]
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The Professionals
Witness the arrival, if perhaps nothing new, of insular communities of professionals that are each and all existentially oriented towards the replication and self-validation that tribal membership provides. The self-replicating and self-validating patterns and symmetries as games of practice and behavioural grammar become both the symbol of membership to a specific group and the self-conscious […]
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Cultural Replication is Error-Prone
Context: What Misspellings Reveal About Cultural Evolution Copying errors represent a broken logical symmetry of system self-containment that provides momentum to effective information-processing and encoding self-propagation. Just as errors in DNA encoding invoke as many useful changes as redundant ones, cultural systems possess and manifest implicit and distributed, endemic information-encoding discontinuities. The underlying logic is […]
Notice that the organisational as much as technical self-propagation in AI research is, beyond the enlightened self-interests of commercial investment and the low-hanging fruit of metric spectacles, profoundly shaped by the degree to which the emergent entities, artefacts and systems provide the optimal opportunities for their own (non-ergodic, constrained or probabilistically-damped) self-replication. I realise that […]
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Managerial Surveillance
Context: Bosses putting a ‘digital leash’ on remote workers could be crossing a privacy line I wonder if it would be all that difficult to demonstrate that each extra technical and surveillance-oriented component in a system of management and governance is actually more of a burden and cost than is the uncertainty invoked by remote […]
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Comforting Repetition
Listening to radio news this morning, pondering the endless cycle of repetition-with-variation that constitutes the sporting events, politics, media fluff and assorted other sequential, temporal tokens of entertainment and news through which so many people measure and assert their collective tribal individuation and participatory self-determination, their subjective Self. It is all really so much emotional […]
Context: The Criminal Potential of Artificial Intelligence Beyond autonomous cybernetic system as tool or aperture of adversarial vulnerability lies the distinct possibility of AI as malevolent criminal mastermind. Notwithstanding the current paucity of anything even vaguely resembling Artificial General Intelligence, and regardless of our best (and worst) aspirations to benchmark and bootstrap this technology into […]
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Stories that write themselves…
It need hardly be said that good ideas sell themselves, that bad ideas only catch fire where (and when) ignorance is in ascendancy, and that only truly terrible and utterly ugly ideas require propaganda or violence to acquire or maintain a hold upon this long-suffering human world. It is and remains a fact worth acknowledging […]
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The Gossip Game
Much of the analytical (academic) discourse regarding social system self-propagation gets swept up and away by the effective subset of communication and information propagation that it, itself, represents. The point: human social systems not only exhibit but constitutively are the distributed mnemonics and information artefacts they produce. Academic and institutional contexts derive value (and relevance) […]
Context: The Great American Novel will not be written by a Computer It’s a great point and notwithstanding that hard-core reductionist types often enough give the piñata of John Searle’s Chinese Room a comprehensively passive aggressive thrashing with pitchforks and torches, it is an irreducible fact under the current ascendant paradigm. Semantic complexity in either […]
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Memetic Entropy
Information entropy wears many masks. The reason that fakes fly further and faster than facts is, similarly, because they carry more information entropy as potential energy or consequence. This is an issue of complex systems dynamics and holistic logical analysis which is still, on the whole, very poorly understood and inadequately articulated at an academic […]
Daedelus Kite 