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Philosophy

Technological Triumph of Linguistic Mediocrity

Context: We could run out of data to train AI language programs  We should be less worried about running out of data to train language models and more concerned about finding ourselves without anything interesting to say. The profusion of large language models does not occur in a vacuum. Regardless that our cognitive (as much […]

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technology

AI: Too much information…

I am quite interested in Artificial Intelligence but suffer from the broad availability an utter tsunami of related technical and general information. This preponderance of generally useful data leads to a very special case of having to invest time and energy differentiating signal from noise. This aspect of learning and knowing in any information rich […]

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technology

Big Data is Watching You

Context: AI Will Hack Our Brains, Expert Says Can we shape the use, value and utility of Big Data and AI in ways which benefit humanity? I am not entirely pessimistic but pragmatic realism invokes both caution and trepidation here. Ethics. A definition of “good use of data” is subject to considerable ethical uncertainty and […]

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information

What is Information?

Information is a quantification of the difference between the current state of a system and its most probable state.

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technology

Amazon Panopticon: the Data Tesseract

Context: A look at the intimate details Amazon knows about us It is not entirely inaccurate to assert that the most effective prison is one which is totally transparent and masquerades as freedom of choice and that, I suggest, is precisely what has happened here. There’s certainly some malfeasance or ethical impropriety of decision-making but […]

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technology

The Big Business of Disinformation

Context: How Facebook and Google fund global misinformation There’s the rub. Not only do complex information and communication networks optimally self-propagate through the autonomous cultivation of threshold levels of dissonance, error and what amounts here to a nurtured “fidelity drift”, commercial and existential (corporate) incentives in this context are quite natively oriented towards it. The […]

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technology

AI’s Poisoned Data

Context: DeepMind tells Google it has no idea how to make AI less toxic The raw data is indeed endemically and intermittently toxic. Filtering out venomous misanthropy from the dataset is a solution but this also requires a language model that does something substantively more than generate probabilistic sequences of linguistic artefacts sans comprehension. John […]

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Philosophy

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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Philosophy

AI: Big Data, Narrow Intelligence

Context: The False Philosophy Plaguing AI The (or at least a) problem here is that the ascendant technologies, frameworks, cultures and commercial incentives have inadvertently stumbled upon the constructive and recursively self-inflected sweet-spot through which those core assumptions themselves optimally self-propagate. If the incentives and rewards for developers, researchers and corporate or institutional entities find […]

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Philosophy

Personal Data, Privacy and the Normative Ubiquity of Technological Self-Surveillance

An introspective taxonomy of labels and the grammatical order of participatory technology in – and as – systems of knowledge and control has always been the nature, kernel and subjective essence of personal identity. It is difficult to identify a particular inflection point at which this Linnean, categorical game evolved from constructive personal boundary and […]

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technology

Engaging Ransomware

The perceived value of any particular information system, entity or artefact is directly proportional to the combined resources applied to protect it from unauthorised access. It is only as a function of the most simply-conceived models and idealised frameworks that such a dynamical system could ever remain static and unchanging. The reality is that complex […]

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Philosophy

AI: The Bias Inside

The bias in machine learning (and AI more generally) is the bias in data. The bias in data replicates the bias in ourselves, our distributed social and cultural information-processing systems, and in the natural orientation of complex information and energy-processing systems towards autonomous self-propagation through optimally-concise self-representational abstraction(s). Machine Learning applies mathematical heuristics to extract […]