I’ve never been entirely certain that educating a person who as a probable consequence then goes on to conquer the known world (of their time) is necessarily a good thing. Of course, we can never be certain what someone will do with the technical knowledge or practical wisdom we might be fortunate enough in all […]
Fear to speak our mind tends to stifle and suffocate good ideas and give bad ideas and wilful ignorance free rein. It is also worth mentioning that bad ideas have an unfortunate tendency to self-replicate much faster than good ones. The only real solace here being that when there are many bad ideas in play, […]
If it were not so utterly catastrophic, this situation would be as fascinating now as it might be to some future generation of historians. The combinatorial entropy as intractable complexity of conflict being what it is, and the perennial failure of institutional language (or individual cognition) to adequately represent (or assert control upon) it, what […]
Context: Landmine-hunting hero rat dies in Cambodia after stellar career Heroes come in all shapes and sizes. Even more heroic, perhaps, for being entirely unaware of what they have done. Bravery not being the absence of fear but the courage to act in spite of it, this is a template – if entirely unrelated – […]
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 […]
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 […]
There is darkness and there is light in every life.
The implicit inconsistency of sufficiently complex logical systems implies that ethical systems, abandoned by the metaphysical anchor of immanent divinity, must seek their own internal anchors and logical certainty.
Daedelus Kite 