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 […]
For all the triumphalist noise surrounding artificial intelligence, what’s been operationalized is not intelligence, but a functionally narrow slice of cognition—one optimised for pattern recognition, statistical inference, and linguistic mimicry. It is an impressive toolkit, to be sure, but mistaking it for general intelligence is like mistaking a wrench for an entire workshop. What’s been […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
The music produced here is eminently forgettable, perhaps highlighting a bias of the attention economy towards confectionery-like superficiality. We’re being overwhelmed by a tide of short sharp bursts of information content that lack substantive value or meaning. As a kind of procedural “hollowing out” of ourselves and our diverse histories, this surely poses a risk to the preservation and sustainment […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Daedelus Kite 