Categories
Philosophy

The Necessity of Cognitive Bias

I honestly wonder sometimes if we make sense of the world or if the world makes sense of (and through) us; it is most certainly true that the information patterns of this world inhabit our minds just as much as we inhabit them. Cognitive biases, for instance, are those endemic psychological faux pas through which […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Arms Race in Space: Governance of Technology or Technology of Governance?

I fear that the introduction of rules, prescriptive boundaries and frameworks will not inhibit the militarisation of this context so much as positively incentivise it, the culture and history of adversarial psychology being what it is.  A line must certainly be drawn in the sand, but it seems that most of these (kinds of) prohibitions […]

Categories
technology

Artificial Intelligence and a Fallacy of Complete Knowledge

An unremitting curiosity of human psychology and culture is that, from about the time – perhaps of the Industrial Revolution (?) – when we acquired a degree of distributed and self-conscious awareness of the extent and consequence of our own procedural and developmental technological progress, each significant iteration has been regarded as the end of […]

Categories
Philosophy

Cyber: Technology, Information, Identity and Conflict

…as a general observation: All of this (shared) online aspiration to reflexively self-validating identity-construction and participatory meaning-generation masks a howling vacuum of dissimulated subjectivity. We seek self-expression but no such endpoint exists, no epistemogical closure or certainty and (certainly) nothing even vaguely approximating to that monster-image of projected, illusory control that stares back at us […]

Categories
Philosophy

Internet Narratives, Self-propagating Complexity and Adversarial Evolution

Some philosophical thoughts on these contemporary, massively-distributed online communications systems: • social media now (largely) subsumes news media and the powerful, potentially unmanageable, flow and form of recursively self-propagating information-processing systems is such that even putatively reputable media or news channels – not to mention governments – are forced to contort themselves and their narratives […]

Categories
culture

Commercial Identities: Generational Difference

Notice how the primary cultural differentiation of generational identity is always a commercially-mediated product, idiom or artefact.  Can anyone ever truly own their expression of identity, of cultural self when it is always already so much someone else’s possession? Does commercial self-interest (even unwittingly) cultivate a possibility for the emergence of self-identity and t h […]

Categories
communication Complexity culture

Disassembling Control: Talent, Technology and Entropy

In any context where an employment and technology ecosystem is so rapidly evolving – recognising talents, skills and aptitude becomes about as difficult and as (ultimately and) unmanageably complex as acquiring or maintaining them. What interests me here is a second-order semantic analysis: there is such an efflorescence of salient wisdom and clever advice available, […]

Categories
technology

Logic: Indefinite Extensibility

The indefinitely extensible essence of logic (Gödel, 1931) is both bug *and* feature. That which provides a possibility of recombinatory (technological, organisational, psychological) development, of the degrees of freedom by which we might define (and endlessly redefine) the meaning and substance of “intelligence” or “technology”, is also the tangled hierarchy of inertia and entropy within […]

Categories
technology

AI: Engineering Intelligence

I wonder in what ways the “engineering of intelligence” recursively shapes, and to some extent prescribes the most probable developmental vectors of, our definition of human intelligence. We may find ourselves several years from now seeking the inflection points and procedural saliences that explain why it is that our core assumptions and concepts of intelligence […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

The Machines, the Mirrors and the Emptiness of Self

The image in the mirror of psychological self-reflexivity is the machine, the rational, the explicable and the logic which has through so many, many iterations become what we now recognise as information and communications technology. An aspirational aptitude towards anticipatory self-explanation is always, perhaps, only ever going to appear or manifest as the percolated surface […]

Categories
culture technology

The Constancy and Enduring Paranoia of Digital Security Updates

Cyber security is now just a part of everyday life. Update, update, update… all this requires is a sufficiently entertaining marketing campaign to elaborate and celebrate the fulfilment of a life spent in the gamified Panopticon of endless technical paranoia and system updates; sitcoms and lifestyle gurus explaining the invaluable personal experience of incessant technical […]

Categories
technology

Impenetrable Online Encryption: Logic Seeks to Differ

An encrypted internet for all? An impressive technology, to be sure, but the nature and the essence of this game of information assurance and technological systems is surely that – not only does a ratchet up the ladder of sophisticated security add complexity (and an associated information entropy regarding degrees of freedom) to a context […]