Access to the high-dimensional complexity resident in machine learning models comes at a cost. It is not being discussed much in public discussions but the ability to interrogate these complex information systems appears to bring an inevitable loss of control over the outputs. Generative systems in particular are prone to this inverse riddle: the more […]
Tag: culture
Generative Uncertainty
What better way to assure cultural, cognitive or communications system continuity than to anchor its rapidly speciating encoding machinery in an endlessly productive combinatorial entropy and kernel core of stochastic uncertainty? This is precisely what generative technologies are doing. Food for thought.
Broken Technology
Technological problems invoke technological solutions which then reproduce the radiating speciation of (many) more problems. Consider the untenable nature of a developmental trajectory so pathologically intent upon, and commercially incentivised by, obfuscating its own conspicuous absence of certainty, self-consistency and teleological closure.
Sly Linguistic Self-replication
I wonder about the extent to which the ongoing evolutionary (as sedimentary, procedural) development of social and cultural systems is a function of the complexity and transmissibility of the linguistic systems they inhabit. This is to suggest that those species of psychological, behavioural and culturally expressive (or performative) identities that actually do occur and/or thrive […]
So, I’ll just leave this here: Yes, violence is NEVER the solution in these circumstances and wildfire complexities. The problem of juridico-political and/or racial and cultural inequity is one to which systems of governance classically apply linear solutions, quite unwittingly reinstituted g the matrix sacristan of self-propagating socio-affective turbulence. It is a poorly-managed problem and […]
What does AI mean for us all?
An interesting thing about Artificial lntelligence so rapidly acquiring such an eloquent aptitude to mimic, engage and constructively deceive us is that this ensemble of technologies do not in any comprehensive sense actually understand us – we and our intricately stochastic behaviours are merely so many numbers and statistical (as probabilistic) relationships or correlations and […]
Mass Hysteria and Social Media
Mass hysteria in the age of social media is not any kind of an exception, it is the rule. The endless tesseracts of obsessively narcissistic taxidermy in filtered montage of body and culture may once have adorned our walls and our family photo albums but now populate our mobile devices, our cultures and our #imagination. […]
There is little doubt that our cultural systems are communications networks, albeit of considerably higher dimensionality than (even) the digital telecommunications systems with which we are all now so necessarily well-acquainted. In a spirit of relatively non-specific philosophical reflection, questions quite naturally arise as to the carrying capacity of these cultural networks and of what […]
Technological Uncertainty
Has anyone noticed that the smaller these computational and communications artefacts become, the more rapidly this whole planetary technological juggernaut accelerates? There’s something of an uncertainty principle here – the more precisely we can measure, define and inhabit the various technological transmission media, the less certain we become about the velocity (and direction or destination) […]
Our shared future is built from our collective past every bit as much as is this present moving moment. Even as the technological juggernaut of contemporary civilisation endlessly accelerates around us, we rarely find time to gaze long and deep into this collective past through the many artefacts, entities and cultural systems that came before […]
Concrete evidence that the West does not have a monopoly on gullible fools. The question is, or becomes, are citizens in democracies or in totalitarian regimes more prone to dissociative conspiratorial narratives? Intuition suggests that it may be the totalitarian states that generate more compliant idiots but the greater freedoms of the West leave people […]
Embracing Difference
There are some failing metaphysical assumptions and troubled subjectivities in the notionally “Western” position and its attendant parochialisms. A drift through deterministic materialism and downstream mechanical (or algorithmic) thinking into untenable philosophical positions also seems somewhat inevitable, if perhaps not entirely irremediable. I am constantly fascinated (and yet to be quite honest also simultaneously horrified) […]