We are building a world that needs to know more and more about us, just as being unknown becomes increasingly valuable.
Tag: data
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Communication 003
What we’re witnessing isn’t collapse—it’s entropic diffusion in a hyperconnected world. As signal density increases, meaning loses its shape and becomes multiplicity. That multiplicity converges—not toward clarity, but toward attractors: points of silence, incoherence, or loss. These attractors aren’t designed—they emerge from the system’s own structure, from the way things flow when nothing can hold. […]
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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AI: Too much information…
I am quite interested in Artificial Intelligence but suffer from the broad availability and 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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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 […]
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 […]
