Categories
cybernetics

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 […]

Categories
cybernetics

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 […]

Categories
narrative

AI, Meaning, Absence

Words acquire meaning from adaptively relational dependency and entanglement with other words and definitions in whichever language, mind or culture they inhabit. Extrapolating this to sentences (and beyond, to narrative and ideology or any other linguistically-mediated system of belief), the combinatorial complexity of referential dependencies quickly becomes effectively unintelligible. A useful mnemonic and metaphor is […]

Categories
cybernetics

Sickly Sweet Insubstantiality: Generative AI in Popular Music

TheΒ musicΒ produced here is eminently forgettable, perhaps highlighting a bias of theΒ attentionΒ economy towards confectionery-like superficiality. We’re being overwhelmed by a tide of short sharp bursts of information content that lack substantive value orΒ meaning. As a kind of procedural “hollowing out” of ourselves and our diverse histories, this surely poses a risk to the preservation and sustainment […]

Categories
technology

Education and AI

We have stepped across an event horizon in which accelerating rates of technical change and the proliferation of “cognitive” tools have outpaced our personal, professional and/or collective ability to stay on top of the diversity and utility of these rapidly speciating systems. Strategic planning for education (as much as for the broader world) will be […]

Categories
technology

AI Gold Rush

A literal gold rush moment, but let’s not kid ourselves about the good, the bad and the ugly of it all. The cadence is already beyond effective management: everyone is constantly playing catch up, and – if you read between the lines, this uncertainty is the kernel core of the value and utility of an […]

Categories
communication

AI Ethics, Alignment, Responsibility, Strategy

Responsibility is significant. Aligned factors: the most disruptive feature of new technology is counter-intuitively NOT (or at least not only) the novel artefact, entity or system. It is the literally self-sustaining(!) discontinuity by and through which existing and persisting organisational or communications systems defensively lash themselves to the mast of strategic and communicative anachronisms. They […]

Categories
cybernetics

Semantic Morphology is Anamorphic

In a context of artificial intelligence and among many other complex issues of governance and control, we can effectively build the conceptual labyrinth of regulatory theory any way we choose to, unbounded from canonical dogma. Some technical dialects and definitions or descriptions will be more inequitable than others and this is the placeholder for an irreducible obligation and orientation towards […]

Categories
Philosophy

DALL-E can’t spell well

I am coming to believe that these shady generative AI spelling misadventures are actually not at all what we think they are. Our primary method of communication in language is subject to core ambiguities at the semantic layer. Certainly, the training data is formative but insofar as language itself is concerned, these disjointedly discontinuous misrepresentations […]

Categories
cybernetics

AI and Strategy

The relationship of new technologies with sustainable organisational learning and growth is not itself new. It’s a journey of adaptive sociotechnical integration that is as beneficial to consider in the strategic whole as it is mandatory to define and refine in the instrumental parts. What is new is that non-linear effects are inevitable at scale. […]

Categories
cybernetics

AI is Everywhere

AI is a concept. That concept is, or for all intents and purposes soon will be, everywhere. Cultural systems instruct us in the relational semantics of high-dimensional combinatorial depth without once ever having to complicate it in this way. This is because cultural systems do not copy the blueprint or source code of their contexts […]

Categories
Philosophy

Replicating Narrative Uncertainty

𝙄𝙣 𝙖 𝙣π™ͺπ™©π™¨π™π™šπ™‘π™‘: 𝘡𝘩𝘦 𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘒𝘀π˜ͺ𝘡𝘺 𝘰𝘧 𝘒 𝘯𝘒𝘳𝘳𝘒𝘡π˜ͺ𝘷𝘦 π˜ͺ𝘴 𝘯𝘰𝘸𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘦 𝘯𝘦𝘒𝘳 𝘒𝘴 𝘀𝘰𝘯𝘴𝘦𝘲𝘢𝘦𝘯𝘡π˜ͺ𝘒𝘭 𝘒𝘴 π˜ͺ𝘴 π˜ͺ𝘡𝘴 𝘱𝘦𝘳𝘴π˜ͺ𝘴𝘡𝘦𝘯𝘀𝘦. A key takeaway is that while the replication of systems of cultural narrative are the center of gravity, truth itself is (or becomes) incidental to the main game of communications system self-replication. Institutional “doom scrolling” is a generative method by […]