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Philosophy

Atavism, Warfare and Cruelty

Putin’s guilt is Russia’s shame. The totalitarian regime in Russia is dependent on ideological throwbacks as atavisms to an ancient world of unsophisticated inter-tribal brutality and ignorance. They have been shaping and preparing their population to participate in (or silently endure) this kind of extravagant savagery for many decades but under Putin the accompanying sociopolitical […]

Categories
Philosophy

Putin as Historical Blemish

I remember a phrase from Marcus Aurelius in which he asserted that the worst thing a person could do is to make themselves and their lives a kind of blemish upon the world. I have been thinking about this in terms of Vladimir Putin. He is certainly inflicting great savagery and brutal abhorrence upon the […]

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technology

Machine Intelligence as Criminal Mastermind?

Context: The Criminal Potential of Artificial Intelligence Beyond autonomous cybernetic system as tool or aperture of adversarial vulnerability lies the distinct possibility of AI as malevolent criminal mastermind. Notwithstanding the current paucity of anything even vaguely resembling Artificial General Intelligence, and regardless of our best (and worst) aspirations to benchmark and bootstrap this technology into […]

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technology

Cybersecurity’s Endless Spinning Wheel

Context: Utah cyberattacks on the rise as millions paid out in new ‘double-extortion’ ransomware schemes Does there ever come a point at which the accelerating combinatorial complexity of this context transcends human aptitude to comprehend and mitigate the hyper-inflating entropy of the problem-space? I imagine that as long as human brains, incentives and motivations are […]

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technology

Ransomware Attacks On Hospitals: Acts of War?

Implicit and endemic grey-zone ambiguities mean that this might never be attributed to anything other than (yet) another heartlessly self-serving criminal enterprise that is leveraging the inflated value of hospitals and health data during a public health crisis. I expect there are some logical and legal hurdles in defining acts of war this way. Not […]