Categories
information

Breathe In: Lungs, Language, Civilisation

There is a relationship between speech and cognition. There is also a relationship between written language and intelligibility. The longer and more convoluted a sentence, the harder it becomes to understand. The harder the sentence is to understand, the less likely it will self-replicate through artefacts, entities and systems of communication. What this means is […]

Categories
Philosophy

Self-ish Resonance

This morning I read an interesting online aphorism from a wise school that suggested that most of what makes a book ‘good’ is that we are reading it at the right moment. Much the same might be said, in functional microcosm, of the perceived value of a social media post or comment. We could ask how […]

Categories
art

Shocking AI Art is actually Nothing New

It’s certainly an interesting faultline, the arrival of all this AI-generated creative material. I suspect that, rather than devalue human creativity, and once the dust settles from the first few waves of grossly over-used generative AI design, an authenticated artist’s work will actually acquire more – not less – value. The general arc and trajectory […]

Categories
Philosophy

All the Simple Things

What is known (or is believed to be known) varies, adapts and undergoes the relentless metamorphosis of entangled streams of intersubjective abstraction we experience as cultural (and now, explicitly, technological) reality, but amongst all this effervescing percolation and uncertain intentions of identity and difference there remains a constant. The song, that is, remains the same […]

Categories
life

Trapped by Choice

Ever noticed that the more connected we all are, the more isolated we become? The more we are compelled to anchor our identities, experience and memory upon an external world, the lonelier and less certain this inner self becomes? Having once passed over the event horizon of self-accelerating sociotechnical metamorphosis we are each and all […]

Categories
cybernetics

A.I., Creativity, Copyright and Plagiarism in Art

Context: Copyright infringement in artificial intelligence art I know a developer that pulled all their code from Github because of Copilot. It is an interesting area of study because, much as has been said of Mozart, AI in its variously generative species are in essence not doing anything profoundly new, they are doing what has […]

Categories
Philosophy

Technology as Transmission Medium for Difference

Technology is a transmission medium for the difference as information and individuation that it then proceeds to iteratively articulate and amplify. The unrelenting technological metamorphosis in which we exist is in this way generated by its own positive as self-accelerating feedback loops, both logico-technical and human-existential. It is in one (limited) sense a closed feedback […]

Categories
Philosophy

Deep Dreams

What I think we might all often fail to understand, seduced as we so easily are by the constructive discontinuity of such biomimetic entropy, is that this is not the product of some alien as Artificial (or Machine and Algorithmic) Intelligence anywhere near so much as it is the reflexive abstraction and unbounded metamorphosis 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

Imagine Dragons: AI

Interesting in many ways but notice how we are essentially witnessing the hyper-inflation of a space of human phenomenology, experience and culture. We are reproducing ourselves, our cultures and our expectations in ways that primarily accelerate the reproduction of those selves, cultures and expectations. It is not as though AI is solving the mysteries of […]

Categories
Philosophy

Language as Mirror Machine and Entropy

It perhaps requires no underlining but it remains sadly self-evident that human history and global technological civilisation (such as it is) maximally self-propagates as a function as much of its failures and dissonant misunderstandings as of its successes. The component microcosms of individuated selves that inhabit and interpret the shimmering whole in, through and as […]