Will the technology companies, and their shareholders, absorb responsibility, act with maturity, offer guidance, or exercise restraint. I doubt it. There is no leadership here, only a sustained sprint for more cash. When the AI bubble bursts, expect thousands of reflexive startups to follow. Not to repair damage or learn anything, but to capitalise on […]
To know how systems work—minds, technologies, institutions—is to stand at a vantage where the contours of failure are obvious. You see the repeating loops, the patterned insistence on precedent masquerading as wisdom, the reflexive grasp for what was done before as though it could still suffice. Awareness here does not grant influence; it only exposes […]
The strange game of personal, digital (ie cybersecurity) hygiene is a mirror turned back on itself. Someone might believe that they are essentially protecting personal data, identity, security — but in truth what is being protected are the very contours of surveillance and extraction required by the (ie world, integrated) communications system. Every password, every […]
The Robodebt scheme, deployed between 2015 and 2019, exemplifies how an administrative shortcut can cascade into human tragedy. By averaging annual tax data to infer fortnightly income, it raised hundreds of thousands of false debts against vulnerable Australians. The program caused profound distress, with reports linking it to suicides among those wrongly accused of owing […]
Context: Will Musk’s Starlink satellites lead to Kessler syndrome? An eventual Kessler syndrome occurring is surely a matter of entropy and statistical inevitability, regardless that even Low Earth Orbit space is genuinely “big”. That is – there are exponentially many more disordered system states than ordered ones and so the accumulation of more components and […]
Context: Juukan Gorge inquiry: Rio Tinto’s decision to blow up Indigenous rock shelters ‘inexcusable’ Wittgenstein at one point identified meaning as a function of use. From a social constructivist perspective, this follows quite naturally as a corollary fact of epistemological (as much as linguistic) self-reference that all integrated information-processing, meaning-generating or socially-constructed contexts embody. It […]
How true it is: even as responsibilities (and their flip-side of worry) proliferate, as we take on so many more burdens and find that we must internalise the normative expectations and behavioural or cognitive and technologically-mediated vocabularies of a world that itself hardly knows any better than does an infant when first learning to walk, […]
A strange property of systems of ideological or political thought is that they offer constitutively unclear or ambiguous paths between their declarative values and the end states they aspire to. Many Democracies (for instance) celebrate those generic Constitutional assertions constructed around the self-evident importance of free speech, freedom of assembly or various rights oriented towards […]
Double-edged swords are the rule, rather than the exception, it seems and it is in general a monumental communications failure that risks and vulnerabilities are not sufficiently (publicly) acknowledged and appropriately managed. Should technology creators be held responsible for the potential disorder and malfeasance to which their products and technologies are applied? Notwithstanding the economic […]
Who benefits from stoking the fires of fear, insecurity and hatred?
Daedelus Kite 