Categories
Philosophy

ChatGPT is Hollow

Context: How ChatGPT Will Destabilize White-Collar Work Aptitude sans subjectivity, a perfect business partner up until about the point at which the vacuum of comprehension becomes normative and all we end up with is symbol-shuffling automation, exponentiated for its own sake. The danger here, or at least a danger, is that the doubling down on […]

Categories
Philosophy

AI and the Labelling Game

Context: Is your face gay? Conservative? Criminal? AI researchers are asking the wrong questions Beyond eugenic atavisms and endemic biases in contemporary technological (and downstream) cultural ontologies, it is worth reflecting that this kind of aspirational certainty in labelling features of identity and character is itself the amplified signal of a psychological reflex that existed […]

Categories
Philosophy

Generative AI Creates, Negates and Alienates

Context: How ChatGPT Will Destabilize White-Collar Work Aptitude sans subjectivity, a perfect business partner up until about the point at which the vacuum of comprehension becomes normative and all we end up with is symbol-shuffling automation, exponentiated for its own sake. The danger here, or at least a danger, is that the doubling down on […]

Categories
Philosophy

Recursive Word Games

It is interesting to observe how all of our problems and transient solutions take the form of word games. Beyond the autocatalytic pathologies of self-regulatory perseveration, I think it is worth noting that the game itself is the sole beneficiary of this psychological and organisational recursion. Language itself is quite poorly suited to the complex […]

Categories
Philosophy

Automated Technological Malevolence

Context: Cybercrooks are telling ChatGPT to create malicious code Exponentiation… it’s a language game, all of it. The hyper-inflating state space of all combinatorial possibility has a tendency to drift, through entropy, into precisely those transient structural constellations that maximally reproduce: • not only the elements and instances or references, idioms, sentences, logical fragments and […]

Categories
Philosophy

Entangled Narratives

Entangled narratives, aren’t we all? A related reflection is as to why the autocatalytic theatre of dystopian pathology percolates to ascendance quite as often as it does…

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
Philosophy

ChatGPT: Linguistic Tesseract of Deception

There has been a wildfire of online interest in ChatGPT over the last couple of days. The software possesses no insights, intuition or understanding and yet its relative eloquence is compelling. What truly fascinates me about all the effervescing interest in this particular language model is that its primary effect has been the generation of […]

Categories
Philosophy

Technological Triumph of Linguistic Mediocrity

Context: We could run out of data to train AI language programs  We should be less worried about running out of data to train language models and more concerned about finding ourselves without anything interesting to say. The profusion of large language models does not occur in a vacuum. Regardless that our cognitive (as much […]

Categories
Philosophy

Trusting Technology?

In our colloquially-asserted hard borders and boundaries as difference and distance between human and machine I wonder if we do not, indeed, simply replicate the questions of trust that exist between persons and groups in embodied, organic intelligence. The relationships between human beings and their technologies are only really a special case of a much […]

Categories
Philosophy

Reverse Engineering the Future with Curiosity-Driven Research

I wonder if commercial incentives might not destructively inhibit and limit the possible range and diversity of all possible research and applications. By which I mean that decoupling curiosity-driven research from purely commercial incentives might open up a much vaster state space of combinatorial possibility than could otherwise exist or be beneficially investigated. It would […]

Categories
Philosophy

Time

There is a certain poetry in the notion that our understanding of time itself possesses a developmental arc and trajectory. It is something of a meta-temporal reflection that might go the way of much other involuntarily metastatic metaphysical inconsequentialities except for this – the unfolding (as organic) growth of our collaborative cognitive, linguistic and cultural […]