Professor Bell provides a fascinating, artfully-abbreviated and profoundly well-informed historical survey of the steam, electrical, computational and AI/cyber-physical technological phase transitions of human civilisation. As an anthropologist, she grounds technological systems in the people and places that inhabit them. It is clearly of critical importance to consider the lived experience of a future that remakes us and […]
Tag: paradigm
Uncertainty is an indirect measure of the sum-over-all combinatorial possibilities of any definable (or intelligible) systems state space. The combinatorial possibilities of any non-trivially sophisticated – i.e. complex – state space are larger than any definition (or empirically-derived knowledge) of that same complex entity. Complete descriptions are impossible for the same essential reason that mathematical […]
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Rethinking (is) Philosophy
Context: Four philosophers who realized they were completely wrong about things The article referenced above is an interesting, if spectacularly shallow, reflection on conceptual about-faces in philosophy. The deeper lesson and message here is not so much that these particular – if diverse – philosophical, political or theological world-views (and their proponents) found themselves in […]
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In What Ways is Science Like Religion?
A key reflection might be: in what ways does the contemporary experience of science, of technology and of an empirical, evidence-based world view actually (and perhaps inadvertently) fulfill many of the traditional functions of religion? In what ways, in short, does science as a paradigm of thought perform the same essential tribal binding and reflexive […]
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, […]
Complexity is a lot smarter than we are – all of our ratiobal interdictions into behavioural and sociological problems tend to amplify by displacement those problems.
A view from the periphery on the tribal self-validation of academic cliques.
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Conceptual Homeostasis
Does the social (and psychological) context of science and technology fundamentally inhibit the free exploration and development of new modes of thought ?
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An Autonomous Science ?
The unfolding patterns, exploratory revelations and emergent complexity of Artificial Intelligence may not ultimately reveal itself to be as useful to us as we (and all our aspirations) turn out to be to it.
A (perceived) ethical void in the bare-metal mechanisms of pure mathematical and statistical Reason generates that ideological and cultural reflex we see all around us as intransigent denial of demonstrable and provable facts.
…we are living in an accelerating moment in which the sane and rational present paradigm might become the quaint or absurdly inconsistent (or at least incomplete) assumption of an earlier era…
Daedelus Kite 