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 […]

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 […]

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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 […]

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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.