Categories
Philosophy

Conceptual Creativity and Large Language Models

The waffling, meandering text more closely associated with stream of consciousness and creative thinking has been slowly bludgeoned into a relatively colourless glue-like soup for corporate, scientific and institutional communication. I mention this because these text-weaving AI tools are now quite rapidly taking the center of generative gravity in regards to the production of such […]

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Philosophy

The Simplest Conspiracies

Systems of belief are commonly engaged as performative role-plays in which the actual meaning or reality of whichever loosely cobbled bundle of assertions one inhabits need not in any way be anchored upon logical facts or verifiable truth. In fact, the more remote from plausibility or sensible, rational forethought and analysis that any particular position […]

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Philosophy

Shipwrecks, Memory, Technology and Forgetting

Our shared future is built from our collective past every bit as much as is this present moving moment. Even as the technological juggernaut of contemporary civilisation endlessly accelerates around us, we rarely find time to gaze long and deep into this collective past through the many artefacts, entities and cultural systems that came before […]

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Philosophy

Meaningless Reflection

There’s an argument to be made for the notion that the contents of our minds are really nothing more than the reflective internalisation of all that froth and bubble we experience from other people. In such a world in which the contents of each mind are little more that the reverberating reflection of all the […]

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Philosophy

Philosophy is Forever Unresolvable

Philosophy is fascinating because, as much as any other sustainably persistent dialect of communication, it endlessly invokes novel parsings of existing ontological constellations in ways that assure the generative uncertainty as doubt by and through which methodological parsings are themselves guaranteed to persist. Philosophy, that is, represents an optimal transmission medium for the languages (and […]

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Philosophy

Freedom of Thought – Against the Tyrants

I always find it so disheartening that the constructive differences by and through which psychological self (and cultural or national) identity emerge from the form and flow of human experience are so easily warped, twisted and co-opted for vacuous political purposes. The totalitarian turn, perhaps more of an oscillating historical cycle, is a haunting atavism […]

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Philosophy

Is AI going to make us stupid?

Dissimulated intelligence percolates to ascendance in this way because it more readily recombines with the plethora of similarly vacuous artefacts, entities and systems within which we are currently inundated. The role of (inter)networked communications systems in this drift through technological entropy into lowest common denominators is clearly that of transmission medium but it is also […]

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Philosophy

Generative AI, Language and Communication

Context: Generative Language Models and Social Progress: Concepts And Considerations What fascinates me most about all of these generative technologies is that, while we quite naturally focus on the technologies and their consequences, we often fail to acknowledge that they are, as much as anything else, an exponentiated acceleration of the production of a kind […]

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Philosophy

The Value of Good Ideas

Fear to speak our mind tends to stifle and suffocate good ideas and give bad ideas and wilful ignorance free rein. It is also worth mentioning that bad ideas have an unfortunate tendency to self-replicate much faster than good ones. The only real solace here being that when there are many bad ideas in play, […]

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Philosophy

ChatGPT is Hollow

Context: How ChatGPT Will Destabilize White-Collar Work Aptitude sans subjectivity, a perfect business partner up until about the point at which the vacuum of comprehension becomes normative and all we end up with is symbol-shuffling automation, exponentiated for its own sake. The danger here, or at least a danger, is that the doubling down on […]

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Philosophy

AI and the Labelling Game

Context: Is your face gay? Conservative? Criminal? AI researchers are asking the wrong questions Beyond eugenic atavisms and endemic biases in contemporary technological (and downstream) cultural ontologies, it is worth reflecting that this kind of aspirational certainty in labelling features of identity and character is itself the amplified signal of a psychological reflex that existed […]

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Philosophy

Generative AI Creates, Negates and Alienates

Context: How ChatGPT Will Destabilize White-Collar Work Aptitude sans subjectivity, a perfect business partner up until about the point at which the vacuum of comprehension becomes normative and all we end up with is symbol-shuffling automation, exponentiated for its own sake. The danger here, or at least a danger, is that the doubling down on […]