Categories
culture

Fiction

Fiction as myth is humanity’s first form of collaborative, cultural self-simulation. Clear boundaries between systems of belief and proven facts might forever be intricately indeterminate but the power and consequence of fiction is unquestionable. The role and power of creative language and an unbounded (if pragmatic) technological imagination should never be misunderestimated. The speculative forecasting […]

Categories
technology

Algorithmic Futures: Competitive Forecasting

In any adversarial contest it is only ever entropy that wins. Not only this, but the contest and competition (pick a context, any context) is the carrier wave for a logic and information metric of difference that it itself circularly, recursively invokes. A predictive algorithm asserted incorrectly that Nadal would lose because it knew no […]

Categories
technology

AI Crystal Ball: Pentagon Pattern Prediction

Context: Pentagon Wants AI to Predict Events Before They Occur If we abstract the concept of pattern formation from its instances, this becomes plausible. This becomes about not specifically determining what is going to happen but rather and as a function of the resonant (i.e. harmonic) symmetries endemic of and to complex systems, where and […]

Categories
Philosophy

Forecasting, Uncertainty, Neural Networks

Context: DeepMind’s AI predicts almost exactly when and where it’s going to rain Question: To what extent the modelling and simulation approximates to the actual systems complexity involved. Probabilistic, predictive within margins of error endemic to deep learning and here provides a 90 minute window of warning in this system. Granted, thermodynamic turbulence and irreducible […]

Categories
communication

Using Social Media for Statistical Analysis and Prediction?

The extent to which we are all merely self-propagating soliton-like saliences in a rippling probabilistic field of information and energy remains largely unexplored but fertile for investigation.

Categories
communication

The Consolation of Etymology: Pugilistic Spell-Checkers

I am engaged in an unrelenting death-match of Greco-Roman wrestling with mobile device spell checkers. I have had some very near-misses on social media. The spell checker on my phone recently tried to insert Gestapo instead of gestalt and circumcision instead of circumlocution; needless to say – this would have dramatically re-framed the intended meaning […]

Categories
technology

Utopia, Dystopia and Technological Forecasting

As the frequency of technological change accelerates, the amplitude and range of uncertainty is concurrently amplified.