Context: Can SenseTime become a Chinese AI champion? Success here being defined as much by the extent to which a corporation becomes a compliant appendage of state control as by technical expertise. It’s a strange game – the control systems being fielded will gradually become the axioms of political power; what is successful as applications […]
Context: DeepMind’s AI predicts almost exactly when and where it’s going to rain Question: To what extent the modelling and simulation approximates to the actual systems complexity involved. Probabilistic, predictive within margins of error endemic to deep learning and here provides a 90 minute window of warning in this system. Granted, thermodynamic turbulence and irreducible […]
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Why do Ideologies Emerge?
Why ideology? Partisan individuation is (an) optimal method by which sociocultural (and technological) systems autonomously self-propagate, through and as us. A threshold level of entropy is constructively reintroduced back into the system as noise that invokes adaptive resilience in and as the distributed information pattern encoding across the entire “surface” of an integrated system of […]
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Intelligence is Endemic to Biology
Context: Single-celled organism can ‘change its mind’ despite lacking a nervous system This is an example of entropy as degrees of freedom; intelligence as manifest choice. Not quite a solid vote for panpsychism but certainly heading in the direction of autonomously self-propagating biological computation being universal within observed biotic artefacts, entities and systems on Earth. […]
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AI’s Poisoned Data
Context: DeepMind tells Google it has no idea how to make AI less toxic The raw data is indeed endemically and intermittently toxic. Filtering out venomous misanthropy from the dataset is a solution but this also requires a language model that does something substantively more than generate probabilistic sequences of linguistic artefacts sans comprehension. John […]
Context: Deep Learning’s Diminishing Returns Rolf Landauer coined the phrase that information is physical. The consequences being that all computation and sophisticated or automated statistical analysis at scale has similar costs, at scale. Diminishing returns is a function of the second law of thermodynamics. The article’s observation that “new approaches” are required is accurate. Are […]
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AI as Propaganda
Context: Attack Mannequins: AI as Propaganda An interesting article but the assertion of ideological counter-propaganda in this context is a bit of stretch. It projects much more structure, aptitude and volition to the behavioural and regulatory (as control/governance) systems than has ever actually existed. The assertion of all ideological positions requires a foil, an antithesis […]
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On Darkness, Guilt and Conflict
The extent to which psychoanalysis is a successful or compelling theory is really a very interesting question in and of itself, even before considering its subject matter. This same dark thread was identified by Nietzsche as being a symptom of more distributed belief-system neuroses. Regardless of where, when or how anyone asserts the causal factors […]
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Fascism
Context: The World of Tadeusz Borowski’s Auschwitz – The New York Review There is “a certain orientation of life toward death” that forms the basis and existential kernel of a pathology that transcribes the arc and trajectory of (an) industrialised or mechanised rationality that in being (or becoming) aspirationally unbounded from the consequences of its […]
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A Self-simulating Cosmos
Context: Largest virtual universe free for anyone to explore The TL;DR: Scientists have created an absolute computational monster of a Universe digital twin simulation. Such sophisticated models, simulations and predictive tools are measured by the material and organisational costs as displacement of complexity into integrated hardware, processing and memory as much as by the representational […]
Beautiful. Natural systems here approximating to optimal functions for energy dispersion (as fluid dynamics) relative to a topography and geography (as much as geology) that they then proceed to reflexively shape and mold. It is no coincidence that the pinnacle of technological sophistication converges on nature’s own approximations. In this case – note how the […]
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Technology as Displaced Entropy
Context: Australia installs first space laser optical ground station in southern hemisphere It is interesting to observe, and from a broader (integrated, technological) systems perspective, that the value acquired by iterating upon and through the technical ratchet of space-based communications solutions and innovations is a measure of displaced information (as much as material) entropy. Much […]
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