Tag: AI

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technology

Who’s afraid of the big bad AI?

Artificial Intelligence technologies raise (or revisit) enduring philosophical questions regarding the relationships between notions of individuality, self-determination and distributed information systems (as language, culture, technology, civilisation) in which such concepts acquire meaning. The gathering stormclouds of technologically-mediated identity-harvesting, surveillance and (emerging artefacts, idioms and tools of) ideological control suggest that we do not understand and […]

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Philosophy

Implicit Bias in Artificial Intelligence: the fault is not in our stars…

For all our aspirations to escape the implicit biases and semantic turbulence of cognition, culture and the diverse linguistic or other semi-formal behavioural and conceptual encoding grammars we inhabit, there are very likely intrinsic symmetries in information and communications systems that orient them towards qualititatively dissonant outcomes. Biases are functional amplifications of difference and information […]

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Philosophy

Limitations of Artificial Intelligence Reflect Intrinsic Individual and Shared Failures

Context: Would you trust an AI Operative in the field? This (quote from the above article) is an assessment of limitations in current AI: “…tend to respond well to what they’ve been trained to detect, but responses can become erratic when confronted with unexpected circumstances…” is in fact, and perhaps not coincidentally, an operational and […]

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Philosophy

The Elusive Beauty of Making Friends

Beauty is a consequence, a visceral inhabitation (sic.) of the semantic, the experience and uncertainty of a numinal, a transcendental that always hovers – bootstrapped – above the ever growing rational and quantitative cartography of blind, clockwork and digital (soon – quantum) self-replication. That experience lies just outside of a logic that can not quite […]

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technology

AI: The Rolling Disaster of Technological Accessorising

I would never suggest that any of us should let the truth get in the way of a good story (or sales pitch and project management agile scrum), but observe how often we end up with the developmental and technological cart placed (well) before the horse. Developments in AI tend towards various unknown (perhaps – […]

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Philosophy

Beautiful Brains and the Mystery of Unified Theories

An interesting consequence of generalised attributions of human exceptionalism is that we tend to automatically believe that all intelligence, all value and all experience exist (and persist) in this diminutive cranial cavity we inhabit. Cogito ergo something is definitely going on between our ears but there is a deep and irreducible mystery at work (i.e. […]

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technology

Robotic Stars: Virtualising Everything

Context: This AI Robot Just Nabbed the Lead Role in a Sci-Fi Movie Dissimulated truths (here, as robotic self-representation) are perhaps always more compelling (if disconcerting) than unproblematically verifiable or “real” ones. Where a truth (or representation) is introduced as an overtly plausible fake, it is the slippery slope and unravelling, accelerating diffusion of value […]

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Alien Anthropology

On AI Ethics-Washing

Context: In 2020, let’s stop AI ethics-washing and actually do something The most mystifying aspect of this ethical issue is that, on a quick survey of available literature, the emphasis is clearly on “fixing the technology” but leaves as conspicuously absent any concerted attempt to “fix our societies” even though these are in fact the […]

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Philosophy

What if Artificial General Intelligence actually wants to be discovered?

We are (all) still attempting to brute-force our way towards Artificial General Intelligence.  If the complexity sciences have taught us anything it is that there is an autonomous orientation within naturally-occurring information and energy-processing (i.e. computational) systems towards self-organisation and bootstrapped system optimisation via logical extensibility and recursive exponentiation.  We appear to be attempting to […]

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Philosophy

What is Hidden

In the search for knowledge and wisdom it is very often what is hidden that is more useful than what is revealed. While we value what we understand and what utility we might obtain from it, the vast and plausible infinity of that which we do not (and can never) know is the defining logical […]

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technology

Algorithmic Bias

The problematic persistence of algorithmic bias is a mystery to me. Not, as it happens, because I am particularly baffled or confronted by this form of technological encoding and mediated emergence of core social and cultural inaccuracies, assumptions and deep-seated human insecurities. It is much simpler than that, in the end. Machine-intelligence powered classificatory systems […]

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technology

Artificial Intelligence and a Fallacy of Complete Knowledge

An unremitting curiosity of human psychology and culture is that, from about the time – perhaps of the Industrial Revolution (?) – when we acquired a degree of distributed and self-conscious awareness of the extent and consequence of our own procedural and developmental technological progress, each significant iteration has been regarded as the end of […]