Categories
culture

Sentinels of Survival: Mythic Conflict

The stories we inherit about war and history don’t just describe conflict; they compress it into forms we can carry. That simplification is partly necessary—communication always trims reality to fit inside language—but it also steers us toward the kinds of situations those stories claim to explain. Myths of courage, sacrifice, and righteous struggle arise after […]

Categories
cybernetics

Technical Insecurity

Because mathematics is infinite, the field of cybersecurity can never be truly closed. The space of vulnerabilities is unbounded, each patch or solution only ever an approximation against the open horizon of possible attacks. Risk is permanent, not as a flaw but as a structural consequence: a system that protects itself must also endlessly expose […]

Categories
cybernetics

Dispatches from the Loop: The Illusion of Privacy

There is no privacy. That’s the first line, the one nobody wants to read, but it’s true enough to carry the weight of the whole argument. What we call privacy now is a commercial product, a marketable illusion. Platforms sell the promise of protecting what they already capture. Governments legislate rights they cannot enforce. We […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Peace

When reduced to its essence, the simplicity of global conflict is as horrifying as it is absurd.

Categories
cybernetics

Electromagnetic Vulnerability

Context: AI-Enabled Electromagnetic Warfare Systems On a general assumption that algorithmic complexity is primarily a transduction of mechanised conceptual logic into alternate (if perhaps inevitable) dimensions, vectored mathematical invocations and expressions of technical entropy; and, given that recursive self-entanglement is both a cause and consequence of intractable systemic (i.e. logical) incompleteness and material uncertainty, this […]

Categories
Philosophy

Confusion and Insecurity

I suspect that human confusion and belligerent insecurity may be irreducible. This is not to say that these things are endemic or necessary properties of either ourselves, or of the world more generally. It is to suggest that our historical development and evolutionary inheritance has so profoundly entangled intelligence with uncertainty that we are not […]

Categories
Philosophy

Will AI take Our Jobs?

The core question is that of continuity versus change. Not only do we find the genotypical logic of Aristotelian syllogisms whispering back to us in various ways in and as these aspirationally cognitive technologies, but we also find ourselves engaging in similarly antique philosophical reflections at almost every inflection point. Aligning personal experience and socioeconomic […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Extraterrestrial Treaty

The first nation to engage in a treaty to leverage a learning relationship with an extraterrestrial civilisation shall likely find themselves so vastly overwhelmed by intelligence, technology and (all associated, downstream) complexity that they might later wish they had simply stayed in a cave sharpening the pointy sticks with which humans are so prone to […]

Categories
information

Cybersecurity: One Oxymoron to Rule them All

In regards to some study and incidental (as unplanned) research I was engaged in recently, it seems to be most eminently true that the very information and communications technologies upon which we now so critically depend are profoundly, deeply and irredeemably unreliable. This may be no big news to you but I think it justifies […]

Categories
Complexity

Power Laws in Cybersecurity

Great graphic (from the people at Information is Beautiful) but it immediately raises a question of just how we measure severity, extent and consequence in this context. Is there an offset and identifiable boundary between naive analysis that concentrates on common as relatively unproblematic or pragmatic metrics and more detailed (yet broader spectrum) analysis that […]

Categories
Futurism

Fear of fully autonomous AI

The mystery here is that what makes AI so eminently useful is its ability to do what we can not in ways we do not in all cases need to understand. There is something of a resonant psychological pathology here: we seek at all costs to invoke generally intelligent autonomous systems that significantly surpass our […]

Categories
technology

The Profound Fragility of Technological Civilisation

Facebook’s recent network faux pas and serial fall(s) from grace led to an observation of culture, technology and psychology in a world that is anything other than resilient to change or catastrophic disturbance: Human beings are never quite so happy as when they double down on unsustainable or profoundly fragile and insecure systems that can […]