The indefinitely extensible essence of logic (Gödel, 1931) is both bug *and* feature. That which provides a possibility of recombinatory (technological, organisational, psychological) development, of the degrees of freedom by which we might define (and endlessly redefine) the meaning and substance of “intelligence” or “technology”, is also the tangled hierarchy of inertia and entropy within […]
Category: culture
AI: Engineering Intelligence
I wonder in what ways the “engineering of intelligence” recursively shapes, and to some extent prescribes the most probable developmental vectors of, our definition of human intelligence. We may find ourselves several years from now seeking the inflection points and procedural saliences that explain why it is that our core assumptions and concepts of intelligence […]
Cyber security is now just a part of everyday life. Update, update, update… all this requires is a sufficiently entertaining marketing campaign to elaborate and celebrate the fulfilment of a life spent in the gamified Panopticon of endless technical paranoia and system updates; sitcoms and lifestyle gurus explaining the invaluable personal experience of incessant technical […]
An encrypted internet for all? An impressive technology, to be sure, but the nature and the essence of this game of information assurance and technological systems is surely that – not only does a ratchet up the ladder of sophisticated security add complexity (and an associated information entropy regarding degrees of freedom) to a context […]
Rethinking Social Media
I came across an interesting idea today: the production of a new, reliable, verifiable, safe and trustworthy social media platform. My reflex was to think: what of the tendency of information and energy-processing (i.e. communications) systems to autonomously drift into optimally-concise patterns and methods of self-propagation? There is no particular brilliance about Facebook et. al. […]
Utopian aspirations are inevitably three parts marketing and one part plausibility. While communication (as much as communications platforms or technologies) is necessarily a matter of endlessly effervescent linguistic or logical self-inflection, the implicit openness of our contemporary context and the cognitive hyper-extension of technological complexity represents cost and burden as much as it does utility. […]
Technology is a double-edged sword
Double-edged swords are the rule, rather than the exception, it seems and it is in general a monumental communications failure that risks and vulnerabilities are not sufficiently (publicly) acknowledged and appropriately managed. Should technology creators be held responsible for the potential disorder and malfeasance to which their products and technologies are applied? Notwithstanding the economic […]
A game of information, influence and seeded (or targeted) turbulence is unlikely to be winnable (or won) by reproducing and reinforcing the structural, organisational components that merely reproduce and self-validate the axioms, grammars and rules of that game. These games are won by rewriting the rules; by extending an existing grammar and logical framework in […]
Big Ideas: Cultivating Curiosity
If intellectual curiosity was nurtured, cultivated, allowed to grow wild and free upon the fertile soils of this grand experiment that is our shared history, where might we all be? Innovation is celebrated but is everywhere suffocated by a culture of convention and conformity.
Organisational systems tend to autonomously acquire and reflexively cultivate those (generally adaptive) sets of abstractions, assumptions and boundaries which best-serve the continued persistence and self-propagation of those homeostatic, corporate organisational patterns themselves. An enduring abstraction of parochial self-importance indicates the point at which historically-justifiable self-belief fractures into precisely the kind of narrative (psychological) pathology that […]
The accelerating hyper-inflation of information and communications technology networks and systems is an overextended structural entity. The primary reason it does not immediately collapse back upon itself is the existence of uncertainty, useful ambiguity and logical entropy. The more components and logical relationships we have, the more those systems themselves generate further artefacts, abstractions and […]
The strangest thing about all of our systems of governance, control and social maintenance is that it is in the very act(s) of attempting to create order that we must necessarily also generate disorder. The more components, moving parts and abstract logical relationships we introduce into the world, the more degrees of autonomous systemic and […]