“System differentiation is nothing more than the repetition within systems of the difference between system and environment.” Niklas Luhmann, ‘Social Systems’, Stanford University Press, 1995, p. 7. The abstractions are effectively the difference between a(ny) system and its environment, replicated and recursively reproduced as the self-inflation and fact that is that system. The abstraction that […]
Context: The False Philosophy Plaguing AI The (or at least a) problem here is that the ascendant technologies, frameworks, cultures and commercial incentives have inadvertently stumbled upon the constructive and recursively self-inflected sweet-spot through which those core assumptions themselves optimally self-propagate. If the incentives and rewards for developers, researchers and corporate or institutional entities find […]
It always strikes me as being an astonishingly dark irony that the core and kernel of a psychologically reflexive desire to identify or assert centralised control systems in the world is quite plausibly the key causal factor that almost entirely problematises and renders such control as functionally impossible. This indicates a deeper psychological property and […]
Context: Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders? The brilliant systems (i.e. organisational, operational) theorist Russ Ackoff once framed an uncannily similar issue along the lines that our organisational systems are in general exquisitely well-structured to continue producing precisely the wrong kind of thing. We might constructively decompose the problem into one not dissimilar […]
Organisations tend on the whole towards an inadvertent orientation for the reproduction of the policies and procedures (as axioms) that were originally cultivated to assist that organisation to perform its defining task, to address its asserted problem space. In this way, we observe the reproduction of procedural systems and behavioural, cognitive or otherwise normative grammars […]
Monocultural or ideological hegemony in organisational leadership is a recipe for disaster. As a general observation, when organisational systems fall into overtly biased configurations and power symmetries, it is rarely a consequence of willful misdirection. From the interior surface of a half-mirrored labyrinth of self-validating justification and institutional logic, this kind of monocultural percolation may […]
Context: Would you trust an AI Operative in the field? This (quote from the above article) is an assessment of limitations in current AI: “…tend to respond well to what they’ve been trained to detect, but responses can become erratic when confronted with unexpected circumstances…” is in fact, and perhaps not coincidentally, an operational and […]
The dynamism and flexibility of language is simultaneously its strength and its weakness. This is a corollary of the abstract/logical and concrete/material extensibility that haunts technology as cyber (in)security but is by no means limited there. It is an irreducibly discontinuous symmetry of uncertainty that plagues all organisations and institutional contexts. The incessant invention of […]
I would never suggest that any of us should let the truth get in the way of a good story (or sales pitch and project management agile scrum), but observe how often we end up with the developmental and technological cart placed (well) before the horse. Developments in AI tend towards various unknown (perhaps – […]
This is an age-old competition between efficiency and resilience, aesthetics and utility. While efficiency and resilience are clearly placed here, aesthetics (as perception or experience) and utility (as effect-multiplication or intentional consequence) oscillate across arbitrary boundaries and definitions. There is an unacknowledged dimension to this binary model; that is, not so much that any reductive […]
The art of the concept (as Philosophy) is one which, perhaps, largely sits outside the grammatical and behavioural constraints of non-trivially sophisticated (i.e. complex) organisational or corporate systems, and for all that it remains as plausibly unintelligible to those systems as it simultaneously embodies inestimable value for them. It is in many ways not that […]
One thing humans do share with the machine intelligence we are so enthusiastically refining is a conspicuous (or at least institutionalised) absence of aptitude when it comes to smoothly and efficiently negotiating unexpected events and volatile environments. The benefits of integrated logistical automation are clear but when it comes to training the machine intelligence that […]
