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 […]
Context: Language Modelling at Scale: Gopher, Ethical considerations, and Retrieval There is perhaps no more salient feature in the landscape of accelerating technological metamorphosis than that of the many and varied ways that artificial intelligence is recursively shaping the shared vocabularies of our current historical moment. Language holds a special place in that not only […]
Open AI have released the language model of GPT-3 for general use, with appropriate caveats. I have previously been skeptical of the ultimate utility of GPT-3 as a creative authorial or (useful) philosophically reflexive tool but discovered just now that if you feed it a sufficiently sophisticated prompt it actually throws back some interesting linguistic […]
The technologies used to computationally automate the analysis and production of text content rely on the implicit statistical regularities of human language. We all know that these tools are really just parroting back the patterns and narratives of speech and written artefact without any degree of comprehension or intent but it is quite simple to […]
Context: A look at the intimate details Amazon knows about us It is not entirely inaccurate to assert that the most effective prison is one which is totally transparent and masquerades as freedom of choice and that, I suggest, is precisely what has happened here. There’s certainly some malfeasance or ethical impropriety of decision-making but […]
Some fascinating video lectures from Jeff Lichtman of Harvard University on the topic of connectomics are linked below. The reflections on technological aspirations to machine intelligence are implicit. Connectomics: seeking neural circuit motifs • Brains are initially maximally interconnected as wired networks and it is the imprinting of experience that prunes this connectivity to more […]
Context: AI Winter I do wonder if we should not (all) be quite so surprised to experience oscillating periods of growth and ossification in any technological endeavour. Notwithstanding expectations of endless growth that align to ascendant paradigms of socioeconomic reality, the tendency of complex systems to periodically decelerate is more than just a measure of […]
Detective Del Spooner : Human beings have dreams. Even dogs have dreams, but not you, you are just a machine. An imitation of life. Can a robot write a symphony? Can a robot turn a… canvas into a beautiful masterpiece? Sonny : Can you? Movie: I, Robot, 2004. (After Asimov). A robot can write a symphony, it just can […]
Context: Vulnerable machines could be smarter ones Complex systems not only natively possess but also harness, amplify and cultivate the uncertainty and ambiguity (as indefinite extensibility) that forever haunts all mechanical or, indeed, analytical approaches to emulating them. A curious symmetry exists within rationality in that it constructs its object as method of reflexive self-validation […]
Context: Guess who’s the biggest investor in self-driving tech? As a general (and perhaps self-evident) observation, note that the sum total of investment at $44 billion would achieve so much more if one company had those resources pooled but that, enigmatically, it is precisely the difference and competition which is driving the acceleration in this […]
Context: Cambridge Quantum Releases World’s First Quantum Natural Language Processing Toolkit and Library We are moving away from chatbots that intermittently hurl absurdities and misinformation at (and as each other and) the world towards autonomous language-processing systems that reason and understand. Whether or not we get there is not as important as that we invoke […]
Context: Brave new Netherlands: This Dutch AI start-up is changing healthcare Michel Foucault‘s observations on the role and nature of surveillance and knowledge were quite on point in regards to this. The nature of a disciplinary/regulatory and /or cybernetic system of social control is such that what occurs in health quickly permeates and percolates through […]
Daedelus Kite 