Categories
cybernetics

Minority Report: Information, Artificial Intelligence and Cybernetics

Context: Cybernetics Film Festival – Minority Report Information is, among other things, a quantification of the difference between the current state of a system and its most probable state. Artificial Intelligence as proxy precognitive toolkit acquires utility and cultural – if not institutional – value as a function of the extent to which its models […]

Categories
technology

Biased AI & Inequitable Algorithmic Justice

Context: Can you make AI fairer than a judge? Play our courtroom algorithm game Bias in AI only ever really focuses and amplifies existing inequality as a function and retrospective, combinatorial abbreviation of historical data. This itself is no great or new revelation: we generate automated decision-making systems that recursively reinforce aggregate cultural dependencies and […]

Categories
Philosophy

Art and Intelligence

Art is surely not bound by artefacts any more than intelligence is bound by a cranium. Generating value in art is really only a function of the extent to which an artefact (as a concept) directly, indirectly or even – in some instances and as a corollary of entropy, inversely – renews or reinvents the […]

Categories
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 […]

Categories
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 […]

Categories
Philosophy

Strategic Blindspots

Context: Colouring Russian views of conflict in the 21st century Positing strategic culture, as are all cultures, as a semantic overlay or usefully-reductive functional self-representation (if even as that which exists unacknowledged or notionally unconscious) of any state is compelling and undoubtedly carries some gravity but such articulate eloquence often masks a fatal analytical flaw. […]

Categories
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 […]

Categories
technology

The Limits of Thought: Algorithms, Brains and our Fragile Humanity

Can algorithms successfully encode for the stochastic properties and endemic entropy that provides sentience with evolutionary intelligence and a bias towards novelty and (information) entropy? There are logical (and philosophical) limits to algorithmic compression or optimisation that biology has nevertheless successfully exploited, not by removing errors but – from genetics to intelligence – by capitalising […]

Categories
communication

The Consolation of Etymology: Pugilistic Spell-Checkers

I am engaged in an unrelenting death-match of Greco-Roman wrestling with mobile device spell checkers. I have had some very near-misses on social media. The spell checker on my phone recently tried to insert Gestapo instead of gestalt and circumcision instead of circumlocution; needless to say – this would have dramatically re-framed the intended meaning […]

Categories
systems

Turing, Undecidability, Adaptation and Cancer

Alan Turing’s proof of the undecidability of non-trivially sophisticated algorithms is sufficient reason for:• the autonomously adaptive, complex information strategies of life; and,• the intractably problematic and recursively non-terminating information transcription of cancer.

Categories
Philosophy

Is Consciousness Everywhere?

It is as likely that the autonomously self-propagating patterns of information and energy processing (of which consciousness is an instance or manifestation) are ubiquitously distributed; such that (what we experience as) intelligence, consciousness and the self-inflective logic of embodied complexity in life are indeed “everywhere”. It is not that what we are is anything radically […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Intuition, Computation and the Plausible Continuity of Human Civilisation

Intuitions are the common solutions or theorems of our everyday life. Going with a “gut feeling” is, however, very likely unrelated to the complex of neurons that actually exist in your gut. It is perhaps more of an insight into the patterns and symmetries of information and energy within (and as) which we exist. An […]