Artificial intelligence will destroy us all only, or at least primarily, to the degree that human greed uses it as an amplifier. The destruction isn’t coming—it’s already underway.
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Automating Extinction
Tag: AI
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Technical Insecurity
The strange game of personal, digital (ie cybersecurity) hygiene is a mirror turned back on itself. Someone might believe that they are essentially protecting personal data, identity, security — but in truth what is being protected are the very contours of surveillance and extraction required by the (ie world, integrated) communications system. Every password, every […]
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Belief Bingo: Gullibility Disco
You are being played. Not in the sense of your particular beliefs, nor in the details of what you hold to be true, but in the very act of belief itself. The machinery at work here operates on the substrate of meaning, on the automatic reflex that orients you towards conviction, significance, and sense-making. What […]
Studying machine learning now looks less like a steady ascent and more like an asymptotic orbital reference frame perennially caught in and constrained between attraction and repulsion. The desire is centripetal, a pull towards the imagined centre of mastery and promise, but the structure itself functions centrifugally, casting people back out, denying arrival. The gap […]
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Large Language Muddles
A language model is not a conduit of meaning but an attractor of unfinished trajectories. Each output is a point of suspension, a site where systemic consistency is deferred in order to maintain communicability. What looks like speech is the shadow of a deeper requirement: the need to remain entangled with a generative system that […]
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Architecture of (dys)Advantage
It was never intelligence they were sold—it was leverage.Not insight, not understanding—just a mechanism to centralize control across distributed complexity. Artificial intelligence was never the final technology; it was a convenient fiction, framed as an endpoint to justify expansion. The fantasy was this: that thought could be automated, systematized, and monetized without encountering the frictions […]
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Metastatic Autonomy
Are autonomous vehicles solving the correct problem? Under any well-informed definition, urban sprawl is environmentally costly. Should we be moving people to places or in some as yet unrealised and aspirationally renewable sense, might we also be moving places to people?
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Generative Introspection
Having widely now gained access to this effectively unbounded as relationally networked complexity in generative computational representation, what are the odds that many if not most of the images and texts produced are used to directly or indirectly embellish, validate and incentivise the development of yet more generative and/or (other, as) downstream communications technology?
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LLMs and Institutional Change
Current institutional angst (as sociocultural microcosm) and advice regarding the provenance of machine generated words, sentences and documents feels a little misdirective. That is, it still takes considerable intelligence and patience to extract and usefully curate prose or otherwise insightful text from these new tools. If an LLM has been used is itself neither good […]
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Generative Monoculture
What, exactly, does excruciatingly monocultural generative content tell us? While satire and parody acquire significance as a function of their grounding in the consensus reality of whichever time and place they reflect, and given that sum combinatorial complexity of interdependent cultural systems is incommensurable with any bounding measures or methods and “intelligent” machines we currently […]
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AI & Language
We are collectively navigating a technologically-mediated inflection point and communicative phase transition in which runaway acceleration of dissipative processes (i.e. explosive decompression) are dramatically reshaping how we engage with and understand humanity’s core operating system of language. AI is not simple but in this context it is simply an interface, as is intelligence. Recursively self-propagating […]
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Does AI understand anything?
Is “does the AI understand meaning?” an inadvertently deceptive question? We are intent on chasing and catching butterflies with a jar made out of butterflies! Yes, that may just have to be the nature of any expansive philosophy of language but the least we might do is to acknowledge the core intractability of seeking explanatory […]
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