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technology

Greedy Billionaires seek to control AI Policy?

Context: How a billionaire-backed network of AI advisers took over Washington This suggests that a genuine existential threat here is not the science or the rapidly speciating logical abstractions that so dramatically inflate artificial intelligence with unbounded potential. The real issue boils down to a runaway train of unrestrained greed. The concept of “existential threat” […]

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technology

Seamless Integration

Context: New Biosensors Allow Earbuds To Record Brain Activity and Exercise Levels This is all moving inexorably towards and through a world in which omnipresent interfaces to human bodies (and brains) so seamlessly merge surveillance and digital entertainment as information encoding, decoding and transmission, that not only does the functional dichotomy of “for me” and […]

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technology

Starlink Murmuration

Context: Will Musk’s Starlink satellites lead to Kessler syndrome? An eventual Kessler syndrome occurring is surely a matter of entropy and statistical inevitability, regardless that even Low Earth Orbit space is genuinely “big”. That is – there are exponentially many more disordered system states than ordered ones and so the accumulation of more components and […]

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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, […]

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technology

UFO Technology Defies Known Physics

Our fundamental theories of physics are only one experimentally validated “local minima” in a much vaster logical as mathematical and material cartography of possibility. If there is something fundamental that we are not understanding here, it represents a salient moment to ponder which of our axioms are incomplete, misinformed or obsolete. That is the point […]

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technology

Artificial General Intelligence: Self-deception

Context: Elon Musk & Joe Rogan talk to “conscious AI” If our intent in seeking to scale the complex asymptote of AGI has been to convince ourselves that it is conscious and possesses subjectivity, personhood or sentient experience, then it is perhaps inevitable that we will arrive at a point where the reflexive conversational and […]

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technology

How Technology Shapes Science

Context: Science of science workshop: discovery & inequality The data and computational tools in use are not only transforming the field, they are recursively shaping the radiative speciation of scientific practice as their own transmission medium. We rarely notice just how profoundly trajectories in science and technology are a reflexive function of the extended phenotype […]

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technology

Ceci n’est pas une automaton…

…entertaining but I suspect there is deep resonance here, if only we were able to sufficiently, efficiently, insightfully decompress it. The mechanisms and the technologies we make inhabit us every bit as much as we inhabit the world populated and inflated, made possible by them. How we do or do not respect those things is […]

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technology

Bias in Technology

The axiomatic error is to believe that bias is something that can be isolated, abstracted, excoriated and fixed. The kernel function of logical system self-containment that compels the indefinitely-extensible combinatorial depth of communications (as information-encoding and processing) systems is grounded very much less upon certainty and teleological closure. Bias is in one way or another […]

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Alien Anthropology technology

Technological Competition

That our failures and our successes are intimately entangled applies as much at nascent planetary technological civilisation level as at any other. Interesting, also, to conjecture that our greatest failures (in microcosm and at scale) are generally in and of a partisan adversarialism that as reflexive psychological and existential compulsion cycles and oscillates through this […]

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technology

Algorithmic Futures: Competitive Forecasting

In any adversarial contest it is only ever entropy that wins. Not only this, but the contest and competition (pick a context, any context) is the carrier wave for a logic and information metric of difference that it itself circularly, recursively invokes. A predictive algorithm asserted incorrectly that Nadal would lose because it knew no […]

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technology

Broken Machines

I’ve spent a long time now down the rabbit hole of technology, science and the conceptual ecosystems that accompany them. The extent to which these devices and machines are fundamentally not fault tolerant is for diverse, yet related, reasons of psychological and commercial self-interest quite widely unreported. The narratives of mechanical or computational ascendance rarely […]