Context: Liquid sheep – drone footage. The patterns of sheep transit are as of slime mould moving, or of liquid flow – perhaps quicksilver. Note that the resemblance is not merely superficial or in any sense trivial. Complex systems dynamics quite naturally gravitate towards functional eloquence over a diminished or abbreviated dynamical vocabulary; more or […]
Tag: Complexity
From the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University: “(…) this white paper and its associated data visualization compare the contents of thirty-six prominent AI principles documents side-by-side.” It is clearly an admirable endeavour. Note that: a simultaneously proliferating diversity of (re)sources and aggregation around key points reflects and illustrates more than […]
The most curious thing about Artificial Intelligence is, as Kate Crawford of Microsoft asserts, it is neither artificial nor intelligent. Information-processing and encoding is precisely what nature (as physics, complexity, biological systems, sentience, intelligence, culture and technology) always and already do. Intelligence is a distributed property of nature and it is only in the very […]
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Political Belief
Political systems, as much as the ideologies which endlessly resonate through them, are very much not as controlled or indicative of individual or collective self-determination as people might choose to believe. There is certainly choice, just as there is responsibility, but the overall complex dynamical system as information and energy-processing field that these artefacts embody […]
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Information Explosion
“Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an ‘intelligence explosion,’ and the intelligence of man would […]
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On Unified Theories of Everything
Singularly final unifying theories are a – or indeed, the – holy grail. The most significant barrier to unifying theories is that we expect them to be domain-specific, narrow and effectively limited – i.e. epistemologically “controlled” or even “controllable”. That’s the core problem – unified and/or unifying theories are constitutively not limited. Further, I expect […]
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Library as Brain
Context: Take a look at this bizarrely beautiful library inspired by the human brain. Fascinating idea – a library inspired by the brain. Of course, all libraries are always and already inspired and purposefully inflated by the needs and activities of brains and their products of hyper-extended cognition in – and as – language, culture, […]
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AGI: The Missing Link
There is something foundational missing and it can not be brute-forced – all emulations are bound to be hollow and haunted. The ontological, holistic bootstrap of autocatalytic system self-containment that provides even a possibility of life, sentience, and eventually – intelligence and technology, is an absence conspicuous by its presence. There is a hidden logical […]
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COVID’s Metamorphosis, Revisited
A salient question to ask at this time is whether or not it is possible for rates of viral mutation to be self-modified. The rationale: if the information-replication and associated encoding mechanism that this viral family of entities represent is autonomously oriented towards maximal self-reproduction, and if accelerated mutation becomes a sustainable form of maximising […]
Cicero: “exceptio probat regulam in casibus non exceptis”.(The exception that proves the rule). Context: The chaos theory of word creation Interesting etymologies coursing as arcs from quarks through stochastic serendipity into literature and beyond but then most etymology is found fascinating to reflective minds. Neologisms are the recursive concatenation and hybrid juxtaposition of pre-existing symbol […]
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Synthetic Biases
Context: What Is Synthetic Data? …and yet, with this – the bootstrap into virtualised abstraction becomes all but complete. Fascinating and clearly intersects with some of Jean Baudrillard’s observations on simulation, semiotics and reality. Training machine intelligence on data generated in virtual worlds solves some tricky problems but at what cost; where does the “real-world” […]
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DNA: Structure is not Meaning
Context: The Human Genome Is—Finally!—Complete This is interesting, of course, but access to the catalogue of the Library of Congress is not the same thing as understanding its contents. (Enter: John Searle’s Chinese Room, stage left.) Of note here is that a record of information is as a function of observable difference in or as […]
