Categories
cybernetics

Automating Healthcare?

At some point it becomes clear that automation in health and social services is grounded in a discriminating efficiency that neither assures nor necessarily sustains and guarantees affordable or ethically justifiable standards of personal care. We shouldn’t kid ourselves about the commercial motivations and political incentives that drive managerial and policy decision-making in this context. […]

Categories
cybernetics

AI & Language

We are collectively navigating a technologically-mediated inflection point and communicative phase transition in which runaway acceleration of dissipative processes (i.e. explosive decompression) are dramatically reshaping how we engage with and understand humanity’s core operating system of language. AI is not simple but in this context it is simply an interface, as is intelligence. Recursively self-propagating […]

Categories
technology

Future Proofing Education for Technological Change?

There is no “future proof.” It’s like asserting the presence of impermeably secure communications systems. Nothing, if not a nice story… …longer-term visions don’t play the same game in better ways. They rewrite the assumptions and axioms, they reinvent it. It is the unquestioned assumptions that generally hide in plain sight and everyday language. For […]

Categories
technology

AI Gold Rush

A literal gold rush moment, but let’s not kid ourselves about the good, the bad and the ugly of it all. The cadence is already beyond effective management: everyone is constantly playing catch up, and – if you read between the lines, this uncertainty is the kernel core of the value and utility of an […]

Categories
communication

AI Ethics, Alignment, Responsibility, Strategy

Responsibility is significant. Aligned factors: the most disruptive feature of new technology is counter-intuitively NOT (or at least not only) the novel artefact, entity or system. It is the literally self-sustaining(!) discontinuity by and through which existing and persisting organisational or communications systems defensively lash themselves to the mast of strategic and communicative anachronisms. They […]

Categories
Philosophy

Technology as Transmission Medium for Difference

Technology is a transmission medium for the difference as information and individuation that it then proceeds to iteratively articulate and amplify. The unrelenting technological metamorphosis in which we exist is in this way generated by its own positive as self-accelerating feedback loops, both logico-technical and human-existential. It is in one (limited) sense a closed feedback […]

Categories
information

Copies of Copies of Copies

It is quite difficult to directly perceive at times but everything we do, everything we see and think, all of our behaviours and beliefs or patterns of reflex and unscripted living joy (or sorrow) – it is all just a flowing form and effervescing pattern of self-replication. What is really clever about it all, and […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Was Capitalism Inevitable?

An interesting question is as to the inevitability of capitalism – or something very much like it – in any hyper-inflating socioeconomic (and by extension, geopolitical) referential space. That is to say: are there senses in which the natural bias towards autonomously self-optimising information and energy-processing systems – as manifest through and as human civilisation(s) […]

Categories
culture

The Implicit Resilience of (a) Limited Cognitive Dissonance

Narrative dissonance is a necessary component of social communication; an autonomous method for introducing the useful information entropy of difference through which biological, cognitive and cultural systems evolve and maintain resilience against catastrophic disassembly.  This difference has become acute, amplified by technology and it’s consequences have all but shredded political civility.

Categories
communication culture technology

Rethinking Social Media

I came across an interesting idea today: the production of a new, reliable, verifiable, safe and trustworthy social media platform. My reflex was to think: what of the tendency of information and energy-processing (i.e. communications) systems to autonomously drift into optimally-concise patterns and methods of self-propagation? There is no particular brilliance about Facebook et. al. […]

Categories
communication Complexity culture technology

Technology: Utopian Aspirations?

Utopian aspirations are inevitably three parts marketing and one part plausibility. While communication (as much as communications platforms or technologies) is necessarily a matter of endlessly effervescent linguistic or logical self-inflection, the implicit openness of our contemporary context and the cognitive hyper-extension of technological complexity represents cost and burden as much as it does utility. […]

Categories
technology

Technological Overextension: Security, Entropy, Logical Hyperinflation

The accelerating hyper-inflation of information and communications technology networks and systems is an overextended structural entity. The primary reason it does not immediately collapse back upon itself is the existence of uncertainty, useful ambiguity and logical entropy. The more components and logical relationships we have, the more those systems themselves generate further artefacts, abstractions and […]