Context: Facebook Changes Name, Announces AR Layer Over Physical Reality Utopian fantasy tends to follow a predictable arc as much in ideology as in technology. The cognitive consequences will be constitutively dissociative and alienating but then, all technology simultaneously empowers and inhibits. A recent study regarding the shrinking of brains some 3,000 years ago aligns […]
Detective Del Spooner : Human beings have dreams. Even dogs have dreams, but not you, you are just a machine. An imitation of life. Can a robot write a symphony? Can a robot turn a… canvas into a beautiful masterpiece? Sonny : Can you? Movie: I, Robot, 2004. (After Asimov). A robot can write a symphony, it just can […]
In an era of complex systems, negotiating organisational complexity is front and center. Large, stratified hierarchies have traditionally relied upon the necessary – or at least (and arguably) inevitable – Manichaean historical certainties that both define and constrain growth, innovation and resilience in this context. In some ways, traditional bureaucracy represents a logico-symbolic aspiration for […]
The most consequential questions are not those that provide answers but that in so doing invoke many more questions, the most interesting and influential information or artefacts of communication are those that generate more information and artefacts, and the most successful technologies are those that generate more technologies as conceptual or logical ancestry.
Indeed. I do wonder if a little constructive self-deception is the necessary cognitive consequence and corollary of a symbolic language that is anything other than perfectly fit for the purpose of unambiguous communication. In this sense, are discoveries really accidental dialects? Feynman diagrams being an (abstract, representational) case in point.
Healthy psychological growth is quite likely a function of the degree to which a person, or indeed – a civilisation, can successfully negotiate the persistent presence of irreconcilable absence that difference and logical dissonance invokes. In this sense, (both) neurotic obsession and territorial expansionism represent an orientation towards the world that constitutes, in varying degrees, […]
Context: Peter Thiel says, forget the hype: Big Tech is slowing down It may be a necessary property of non-trivially sophisticated dynamical systems to oscillate through periods of acceleration and deceleration. Rising complexity in this context is equivalent to acceleration, logically as much as materially; we may quite sensibly speak of self-gravitation in this context. […]
Context: 94% of the universe’s galaxies are permanently beyond our reach The scale of the cosmos is astonishing. Some estimates infer 2 trillion galaxies and some variations of cosmological hyper-inflation (i.e. early expansion) require an infinite Universe. What is most astonishing of all, though and to anyone who stares into this abyss for longer than […]
Context: The Uselessness of Useful Knowledge Epistemological uncertainty is the center of gravity and compelling force (as vacuum) that drives discovery. AI constitutes something of an instance of a much broader principle (or sociotechnical pattern). Inductive utility is a function of the degrees of reduction in uncertainty but this same uncertainty as occluded knowledge faces, […]
Beyond the most broad brushstrokes of inductive intuition, we should never assume anything about others’ thoughts or intentions and yet find ourselves quite naturally predisposed by endemically limited information to do precisely this. A corollary assumption being that not only are the assumptions we make as essentially and irreducibly metaphysical assertions regarding others most likely […]
Context: Pentagon Wants AI to Predict Events Before They Occur If we abstract the concept of pattern formation from its instances, this becomes plausible. This becomes about not specifically determining what is going to happen but rather and as a function of the resonant (i.e. harmonic) symmetries endemic of and to complex systems, where and […]
An enigma: the shambling, self-propagating golem [let’s not kid ourselves – it’s much more Frankenstein than Jetsons] of mass/social communications systems maximally self-propagates and recursively reproduces itself through precisely the dissonant turbulence that we are now obligated to engage as both an existential threat and aperture of opportunity. How, in other words, to bootstrap, loop […]
Daedelus Kite 