Look, peace and war aren’t opposites in any meaningful structural sense—they’re entangled attractors on the same semantic surface. They both pull from the same underlying logic of deferral and substitution; they’re different inflections of the same topological fold. Once you start mapping this—especially post-machine learning, post-automation turn—what you find isn’t polarity, it’s proximity. The concepts […]
Nothing quite so succinctly captures the cultural spectacle and general media Zeitgeist of jousting ideological anachronisms than does the symbolic Greco-Roman wrestling match of a contemporary Presidential political debate. Quite agnostic of personal political and/or philosophical systems of belief, I am worried by the vacuum of integrity and character on display. Having an opinion has […]
Software is a strange beast and yet now so ubiquitously endemic to our human world that we’ve all but become desensitised to its presence and its consequences, even as we struggle to manage dependencies, complexity, security and accelerating supercession. What I think we might be misunderstanding is that software is, much like ourselves, a transmission […]
Humanity is, as ever, bound by our endemic fascination and obsession upon details and aesthetic narcosis in the beauty of visual and narrative abstractions. We serially fail to recognise and comprehend that it is the property of recursive self-similarity that is far more significant than any of its transient instances. Beautiful, but profoundly incomplete, we […]
It seems quite petty and inadequate to aspire to “simply” solve just one of the world’s complex problems. Let’s solve them all, simultaneously. What is the one thing that every thing shares? What essence or abstraction binds the world together in some way as “reality” or intelligibility and experience? While it may be possible that […]
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 […]
For a world in which aggression, control and variously domineering forms of persuasion and exploitation have been serially celebrated and canonised as virtuous – communicating the significance of humility and compassion takes on all the character and significance of an authentic act of kindness. You are never simply stuck in bad traffic, you (and we […]
It seems to me that most technologically-inflected discussions of what it means to be human begin from the assumption that our experience represents some kind of necessary closure as terminal (and teleological) endpoint. The notion that intelligence or sentience (and intelligence- or sentience-like) artefacts, entities and systems could ever represent any kind of pinnacle (or […]
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 […]
Observe how we fear the generative mechanisms of our own self-reproduction. Language lives through us just as we do through it and were it not that the developers and the discoveries will unlikely be put back in their genie bottles any time soon, we might successfully regulate the rapidly percolating uncertainties that our own unbounded […]
It is precisely because conflict is a kind of communication that it persists so far beyond the infancy of our species. Artefacts and entities of communication remain in this world for as long as they do through the many ways they endlessly reproduce themselves both through and as us. War, fear and hatred perennially percolate […]
Nope. If nothing else and far beyond the actual sophisticated engineering (*not* rhetorical) problem this represents, to render life endless is simultaneously to render it meaningless. It may not always be obvious but value is not anywhere near so much a function of abundance as it is of scarcity. It is the transience of our […]
Daedelus Kite 