Categories
Philosophy

Is AI going to make us stupid?

Dissimulated intelligence percolates to ascendance in this way because it more readily recombines with the plethora of similarly vacuous artefacts, entities and systems within which we are currently inundated. The role of (inter)networked communications systems in this drift through technological entropy into lowest common denominators is clearly that of transmission medium but it is also […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Russian Roullette: Strategic Void

Putin has mastered a political game of Machiavellian command and control, of surveillance and power but he remains quite clearly overwhelmed by the unmanageable complexities of the war he has invoked and inflicted as much upon his own people as upon the peoples of Ukraine and, through them, of the free world. The danger of […]

Categories
culture

Smart Weapons, Dumb Wars (slight return)

To repeat: The only reason we need smart weapons is because we are too stupid to stop fighting wars.

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Smart Weapons and Stupid Wars

It is only because we are quite astonishingly and catastrophically unable to end wars that we find ourselves in so very many ways and for so very many different reasons still fighting them. We have refined our sharpest technological insights as a function of conflict and the intertribal dissonance that our species specialises in. What […]

Categories
Philosophy

A Rudderless Vessel

Beyond a very limited range of skill or intuition, no one really knows what they are doing or how best to organise our world. Systems of belief asserting closure and certainty emerge as an inverse function of a growing doubt and uncertainty that they mask with spectacles of bravado or deception. Stupidity as simplistic systems […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Nuclear Weapons are Stupid

Context: Bombs and the Bikini Atoll I recently saw an interview with US Gen (ret.) Colin Powell discussing this technology. His assessment seems to be accurate – these weapons are so powerful and of such vast consequence that they are effectively and completely useless. If any one side or warhead-or-sabre-rattling power were to launch a […]

Categories
communication

How Social Media Bruteforces Superficiality

A recent quick dip and paddle into one of the big social media platforms revealed what is probably quite starkly and bleedingly obvious to other observers: attempts (by pretty much anyone) to say anything that is not entirely trivial and inconsequential, regardless of perceived or actual bias or partisan agenda, creates an enormous flurry of […]

Categories
Psychology

Ignorance is Bliss

If it is true that ignorance is bliss, I am surprised that there are not many more blissfully happy people in this world. Ignorance, of course, has quite little to do at all with acquired knowledge or education and is more often a direct measure of a person (or group) being unable to accommodate the […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

The Fools are Flying this Civilisation into Self-Destruction

A contemporary proliferation of fools is not half as terrible as their common access to digital communications platforms through which they might channel, diffuse and disseminate their compound and stagnant simpleton’s craft of remedial unknowing. In waving these great banners of stupidity, they seek to bludgeon rationality, intelligence and civilisation itself into humble (and submissive) […]

Categories
systems

The Purpose of Stupid Ideas

Does human stupidity actually serve a sociological purpose ?

Categories
culture history Philosophy politics

On Stupid Ideas and Clever Solutions

Countering stupid ideas proves to be a matter of some subtlety and intelligence…

Categories
Science

Climate Change: Time is Running Out

This is how it starts: the heatwaves, the droughts, the fires, the extreme weather…