It is a truth almost universally known but rarely, if ever, acknowledged that the strengths and the values of our world are simultaneously its weakness and qualitative (as much as quantitative) poverty. Contemporary communications systems have, for instance, been truly wonderous - they have brought us all closer together through near-instaneous text, voice and video…
The Violence Paradox: is this Really a More Peaceful World?
The cost of order is always going to be a certain degree, presence or manifestation of disorder. The notion of a "more peaceful world" is one in which vast numbers of (relatively) small, regional conflicts proliferate, generalisations notwithstanding. There is even, perhaps, a sense in which such distributed conflict is inevitable as a displaced information…
Cancer, Senescence, Computation and Complexity
I had an intuition that rather than genetic or cellular breakage and strict malfunction that cancer represents something of an uncanny alignment with the Halting Problem of computational theory. What is on one level a function of an atavistic throwback to deep biological history where replication and continuity at all costs provides a cellular (genetic)…
On Reason and Intelligence in Mind and Machine
What differentiates reasoning from algorithmic procedure and computation? Does reasoning suggest comprehension, agency, subjectivity or is it just a complex sequence and integrated, autonomously self-propagating network and goal-directed pattern of blind mechanism and self-inflected logic? If reasoning is really just complex algorithm, and if the treasured concepts of our own embodied knowledge and experience are…
Culture, Cognition, Meaning
Culture, like meaning, is not found in one single place but is distributed across the entire surface of our shared cognition and the proliferating multiplicity of artefact, image and a logic of sequential algorithm and rationalised procedure that informs our experience. The self-evident fact that we are unable to unambiguously or unproblematically define or agree…
Self-Propagating Technological Metamorphosis
If you listen very carefully you can almost hear a faint whooshing sound as the vacuum created in the wake of the products of our own creative intelligence, which having long ago outpaced us, draws us inexorably along behind it. As the accelerating juggernaut of pure and abstract technological metamorphosis has always - and perhaps…
Cyber Security and Governance: to Centralise or not to Centralise?
Cyber security is a fascinating and r rapidly evolving problem-space. What possible solutions exist in regards to coordinated governance and oversight? If a centralised software and hardware development methodology iss used - compliance to formal standards could be assured but the (logically and materially inevitable) emergence of vulnerability and exploit would mean that this systemic…
Business Systems, “Best Practice” and Self-propagating Bureaucracy
Questions could (and should) be asked of the extent to which systems, architectures, models and programs can be (and are) produced for the primary self-interest of the organisations which provide those solutions. Bureaucracies and (all of) their diverse hierarchical predecessors, for instance, are classically-versed in the dark arts of creating systems and mechanisms that generate…
Evanescence
Travelling into the future is an inverse archaeology of entropy. There is some possible future, a singular branch of most probable outcomes in an undiscovered and unknowable configuration of ourselves towards which we all travel. A small consolation lies in being clever enough to decode this inexorable material process and abstract logical labyrinth of decay…
Artificial Intelligence and an Archaeology of the Present
While we are able to cultivate semi-autonomous technical solutions that provide insight into material records of communication and - through them - a historical sedimentation of the self-replicating complexities of culture and cognition in information-encoding logic (as language), we seem a little less able to apply those same technical solutions to untangle the challenges represented…
Monday mornings…
...a vast and yawning abyss of commuter futility only partially masked by the endless distraction of engorging ourselves on information artefacts, channels, opinions, fiction and repetition. It is as though we can not even savour our loneliness and feelings of dispossession or pointlessness at all of this cyclical and directionless repetition. The cognitive landscape of…
Engaging Fake News: Information Security, Journalism and Artificial Intelligence
Here is some interesting content on the topic of identifying fake news and media content Verifying online information: The absolute essentials. Related to this - AI is rapidly becoming proficient at generating compelling, targeted falsehoods and dissimulating sources across diverse media artefacts, channels and contexts. In information security there is a turn towards entirely automated…
