Tag: automation

Categories
cybernetics

Technology is the Problem

The refrain once urged us to expand: “Turn on, tune in, drop out.” Its inversion is now the survival mechanism: Tune out, turn off, drop in. Digital platforms have mastered the art of capture. They are not designed to serve us but to extract attention, time, and revenue from us. The architecture is parasitic—every click […]

Categories
cybernetics

How I Use Language Models

G doesn’t treat a language model as a source of truth or as a substitute for thinking. He uses it as a mirror, a surface, and sometimes as a blade. The interaction is structured—deliberately so. There’s refinement, iteration, and strategic pressure applied to weak points in the model’s generative structure. This isn’t about chatting. It’s […]

Categories
Philosophy

Lists

Lists seduce us with the illusion of order—each item a shard of clarity arranged just so, hinting at mastery over the infinite. They compress the world into clean lines and neat progressions, comforting in their symmetry, irresistible in their simplicity. In a culture tuned to acceleration, these fragments multiply, not to deepen understanding but to […]

Categories
cybernetics

Automating Healthcare?

At some point it becomes clear that automation in health and social services is grounded in a discriminating efficiency that neither assures nor necessarily sustains and guarantees affordable or ethically justifiable standards of personal care. We shouldn’t kid ourselves about the commercial motivations and political incentives that drive managerial and policy decision-making in this context. […]

Categories
Philosophy

Existential Pragmatics and Emergence

There are, in general, two main ways to understand a complex system-of-systems. First, as an adaptive constellation of modularly decomposable artefacts, entities and sub-systems as subject to and expressions of orchestration and directed purpose – that is, in terms of its differentiated parts and their relationships. Later, as a bonded, binding proxy organism in which […]

Categories
Philosophy

Automating Language

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 […]

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

Future of Work: Will AI create a Vocational Apocalypse?

What is perhaps most disturbing about the artival of autonomous systems and AI is not the plausible inevitability of monumental vocational disruption; it is that there are so few ongoing or persistent, well-informed and broadly-accessible public and (non-partisan) political discussions regarding the extent to which these upheavals will reshape entire economic, social and cultural value […]

Categories
Philosophy technology

The Limits of Automation

If automation is only limited by the boundaries of what we can describe, are we actually capable of describing those entities, processes, objects and systems of non-trivially sophisticated complexity with which we all must eventually and inevitably engage ?

Categories
art culture technology

Art without an Artist ?

Is AI-generated art an omen of things to come ? Are we writing ourselves out of our own story ?

Categories
culture

Cognitive and Technological Hyper-extension: Why Worry ?

As technologies and hybrid technology-and-human systems continuously insert themselves into our workflows and thought patterns, we become progressively and perhaps irreversibly beholden to them more than they could ever remain subject to us…

Categories
culture

On Technology, Culture and Sleepwalking into Non-existence

We are really not for the most part noticing the depth and extent of the ongoing procedural acquisition of all of our cognitive, interpersonal and administrative (or more broadly speaking – organisational) processes and behavioural patterns by technology…