When encountering the serially haunted futility of so much of our species’ belligerently selfish behavioural vocabulary, I often resort to an attempted witty quip to the effect that this is, yet again and quite simply, “human beings being human”. It is not after all as though most who conduct themselves in variously disgraceful ways have […]
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 […]
I found this photograph completely randomly recently. It is of a 9 year old girl on a train bound for Auschwitz- Birkenau. The “girl with a headscarf” was Anna Maria Steinbach. The scarf covered her (now) short-cropped hair. The girl was murdered by gas in July 1944. We can never forget the horrors of fascism […]
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 […]
Ethical frameworks are those guiding principles within which we are free to make moral choices. The extent to which our choices align to the semantic intentions of any particular ethical framework is a definition and declaration of our adherence, conformity or alignment to it. Notice, however, that the majority of ethical frameworks we encounter do […]
Power is really an inverse function of ethics. What is considered permissible or (indeed) valuable under any moving ethical frame of reference is implicitly – some would argue necessarily – representative of the power structures, systems and integrated social, political and ideological modalities of a time and place. Notice also that what is considered good […]
The question might be not as to if or when General AI successfully transcends human intellect, but rather – what is it about the culture, competition and commercial (or, to be frank, geostrategic and complex adversarial) contexts in which these technologies currently effervesce and thrive that might only ever guarantee that they are shaped from, […]
It is only by the existence of darkness in our lives that light inversely acquires the value it comes to possess. I would never wish harm upon anyone but similarly I would never wish that their lives were entirely untroubled. Beyond the fact that the Universe is always and already predisposed by logic as much […]
It makes me angry that the most beautiful souls are always first to perish and in their suffering we witness an enduring twilight of innocence in this world. As though it was not enough that all the hollow devils so enthusiastically vandalise the thread-bare tapestry of what remains of their own toxic hearts, they find […]
Beauty has two faces. One is the natural symmetry and resonant eloquence of the parts as they are manifest in and as a whole, of unified pattern and unity. The other is the abstraction and symbolic token of value and meaning that we cultivate (and inherit as culture) through language and tradition. The first is […]
The greatest irony of every instance of civilisation collapse has probably never been that it comes without warning or time to avert impending catastrophe, as even then when disaster looms it is never entirely unexpected or unforeseen by those bearing sufficient intellect to observe its impending arrival. It is much more likely that we will […]
As a general observation on censorship, redaction and purposeful obfuscation: Information Theory indicates the extent to which strings of symbols bear useful or valuable information and this is measured by the probabilistic entropy and literal surprise of that salience. An enigma of redaction is that, while the extraction of prominent or revealing features of narrative […]
Daedelus Kite 