It is perhaps because we know, unseen and unpalatable, that each and all of us is only ever bound to achieve what in the ultimate reckoning is transient and quite probably inconsequential that we double-down on the rule-shuffling, grammatical orthodoxies, methods and practices of an abstract tokenised rationality that in all truth hardly serves us […]
We are perhaps all on an arc and trajectory of discovery upon which that which was though to be an exception only ever reveals itself as the rule by and through which the normative reality of our own world and all its diverse complexity, information, matter and energy begins to feel a little like an […]
Much of the analytical (academic) discourse regarding social system self-propagation gets swept up and away by the effective subset of communication and information propagation that it, itself, represents. The point: human social systems not only exhibit but constitutively are the distributed mnemonics and information artefacts they produce. Academic and institutional contexts derive value (and relevance) […]
Context: Liquid sheep – drone footage. The patterns of sheep transit are as of slime mould moving, or of liquid flow – perhaps quicksilver. Note that the resemblance is not merely superficial or in any sense trivial. Complex systems dynamics quite naturally gravitate towards functional eloquence over a diminished or abbreviated dynamical vocabulary; more or […]
Despite being quite well suited by geography and economy to weather the pandemic, it seems the inevitable has happened and – part epidemiological entropy, part selfish human stupidity, part bad luck – COVID-19 has gained a foothold again here in Australia. Every morning and several times a day I check the news media online to […]
From the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University: “(…) this white paper and its associated data visualization compare the contents of thirty-six prominent AI principles documents side-by-side.” It is clearly an admirable endeavour. Note that: a simultaneously proliferating diversity of (re)sources and aggregation around key points reflects and illustrates more than […]
Political systems, as much as the ideologies which endlessly resonate through them, are very much not as controlled or indicative of individual or collective self-determination as people might choose to believe. There is certainly choice, just as there is responsibility, but the overall complex dynamical system as information and energy-processing field that these artefacts embody […]
Information entropy wears many masks. The reason that fakes fly further and faster than facts is, similarly, because they carry more information entropy as potential energy or consequence. This is an issue of complex systems dynamics and holistic logical analysis which is still, on the whole, very poorly understood and inadequately articulated at an academic […]
“Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an ‘intelligence explosion,’ and the intelligence of man would […]
There is something foundational missing and it can not be brute-forced – all emulations are bound to be hollow and haunted. The ontological, holistic bootstrap of autocatalytic system self-containment that provides even a possibility of life, sentience, and eventually – intelligence and technology, is an absence conspicuous by its presence. There is a hidden logical […]
Because entropy. There are always and as a consequence of combinatorial necessity more disordered states available than ordered ones and as a consequence debate eventually travels through them into dissonance and disagreement but this, curiously, is also the source for more philosophy. It is a common (recursive) idiom and is endemic of and to logic, […]
Context: The Human Genome Is—Finally!—Complete This is interesting, of course, but access to the catalogue of the Library of Congress is not the same thing as understanding its contents. (Enter: John Searle’s Chinese Room, stage left.) Of note here is that a record of information is as a function of observable difference in or as […]
