Categories
technology

The Great American Novel will not be Automated

Context: The Great American Novel will not be written by a Computer It’s a great point and notwithstanding that hard-core reductionist types often enough give the piñata of John Searle’s Chinese Room a comprehensively passive aggressive thrashing with pitchforks and torches, it is an irreducible fact under the current ascendant paradigm. Semantic complexity in either […]

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culture technology

The Constancy and Enduring Paranoia of Digital Security Updates

Cyber security is now just a part of everyday life. Update, update, update… all this requires is a sufficiently entertaining marketing campaign to elaborate and celebrate the fulfilment of a life spent in the gamified Panopticon of endless technical paranoia and system updates; sitcoms and lifestyle gurus explaining the invaluable personal experience of incessant technical […]

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systems technology

Cybersecurity’s Unacknowledged Truth

The whole cybersecurity enterprise seems to be built upon a suite of psychological and culturally-reflexive assumptions that assert that there exists even a possibility of logical or systemic closure. No such closure or completion is possible and this is rarely acknowledged.

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technology

On Reason and Intelligence in Mind and Machine

What differentiates reasoning from algorithmic procedure and computation? Does reasoning suggest comprehension, agency, subjectivity or is it just a complex sequence and integrated, autonomously self-propagating network and goal-directed pattern of blind mechanism and self-inflected logic? If reasoning is really just complex algorithm, and if the treasured concepts of our own embodied knowledge and experience are […]

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culture

Biological Computation

Context: Workshop: Do living things compute? More fascinating collaboration from the Santa Fe Institute. In short and in gestalt: it all seems to invoke a form of computation that is neither particular or distributed but is both simultaneously; that is not finite or discrete in the sense of having easily-defined or simply-encapsulated boundaries; and it’s […]

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Psychology

Detecting Deception

In an era of machine learning and artificial intelligence, there may be nowhere that is not unveiled by the light of information and data measurement.

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culture

On Algorithms as against Exceptionalism

Will the enthusiastic cultural and economic act of handing our collective destinies over to an overt and arbitrary algorithmic logic lead to a gradual (or rapid) and self-propagating bias towards “flattening out” of outliers, eccentrics, and authentic innovation ?