The greatest threat from Big Tech isn’t superior intelligence. It’s ordinary stupidity armed with extraordinary power.
Tag: systemic risk
Technocratic civilisation maintains its continuity through repeated technical discontinuity, and its security through the management of insecurity.
The flying car illustrates the peculiar absurdity of developing increasingly sophisticated means of getting somewhere while losing collective control over where we are going.
Technology, corporate power, political division and institutional decay are undermining civilisation. Understanding how these forces reproduce themselves is the beginning of change.
Japan’s cybersecurity crisis reveals how interconnected infrastructure creates systemic vulnerabilities that conventional security measures cannot eliminate.
The scale of the consequences has changed while the competitive selection tests for authority remain embarrassingly small.
A civilisation builds systems to solve its problems, then discovers that the systems have become the problems, while its dependence upon them has made their continuity deeply problematic.
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AI: When the Bubble Bursts
AI is building the dependencies that make its own expansion increasingly necessary.
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A Theory of Dickheads
Everyone knows a dickhead. The interesting question is why the conditions that generate them do so, enduringly, and with such uncanny frequency.
Institutions rarely fail because they cannot recognise problems. They fail because recognising problems is not the same as escaping the conditions that reproduce them.
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all swallowed whole
Technology cannot solve itself, because the introspective incompleteness that limits it is a function of the same combinatorial unboundedness that makes it at all possible; spoiler: we humans are similarly and simultaneously bound by identical logic.
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technological recursion
Technology promised to save us effort, then quietly reorganised civilisation around the effort required to sustain technology.
