It is groups of individuals that inhabit these virtual meeting places but beyond a certain threshold of technological complexity, individuation becomes an erasure and hollowing dependency on the technical, the integrating network and the potentially irreversible colonisation of choice, memory and identity.
Even as technology provides us the arc and contour of combinatorial individuation, it reduces us to a mere shadow, superficial reflection and fading memory of our own experience.
The mystery here is that what makes AI so eminently useful is its ability to do what we can not in ways we do not in all cases need to understand. There is something of a resonant psychological pathology here: we seek at all costs to invoke generally intelligent autonomous systems that significantly surpass our […]
The most interesting conceptual artefacts, entities and systems are often like this – they maximally replicate the degrees of freedom by and through which we might leverage utility but do so in ways that hardly if ever lock down ontologies and definitions in unambiguous closure. This is the recursive self-propagation of a logical depth and […]
The further and faster our collaborative human endeavour expands into the vast and sprawling information space we have cocooned ourselves in, the more that our cognitive hyper-extension in and as technology and myriad dialects of identity speciates and radiates, the more sophisticated and intricately complex our world becomes – the greater the dissipative acceleration into […]
Cybernetics tends to be as diverse as the spectrum of artefacts, entities and systems to which it intelligibly or contextually applies. If applied to cybersecurity, must cybernetics necessarily internally model and assume at least the level of variety (as complexity, combinatorial entropy) that its object of study asserts? In this case, does cybernetics then acquire […]
The technologies of Artificial Intelligence have had stunning success with a hyper-inflating speciation of statistical in logical and inferential complexity as the savant-like Narrow AI that Gary Marcus references. The recognition of an ontological bootstrap and conspicuous absence of “common sense” being an optimistic step in a direction towards General as (at least minimally) sentient […]
The philosophical question remains: is the hyper-extended cognition of abstraction into virtual worlds a running towards or away from reality, from ourselves? Utopia, dystopia or simultaneously both? We should not be surprised that, just as with any journey or symbolic displacement of subjective identity and experience that, regardless of the embellishment or sophistication of the […]
In a Universe of potentially 2 trillion galaxies, by some models of cosmological inflation necessarily infinite in extent, we should be much less surprised that we have not found our own very specific and plausibly transient technologies staring back at us from this abyss. For perhaps no other reason than relative developmental and logical self-consistency, […]
Oh yes, mortgages are now a thing in the Metaverse. There is something really interesting here, from a speculative philosophical and psychotherapeutic perspective. Some people are quite willing and enthusiastic to jump on the bandwagon of perceived or projected value in and as virtual artefacts, entities and systems. This is plausibly because at a reflexive […]
In any adversarial contest it is only ever entropy that wins. Not only this, but the contest and competition (pick a context, any context) is the carrier wave for a logic and information metric of difference that it itself circularly, recursively invokes. A predictive algorithm asserted incorrectly that Nadal would lose because it knew no […]
I’ve spent a long time now down the rabbit hole of technology, science and the conceptual ecosystems that accompany them. The extent to which these devices and machines are fundamentally not fault tolerant is for diverse, yet related, reasons of psychological and commercial self-interest quite widely unreported. The narratives of mechanical or computational ascendance rarely […]
Daedelus Kite 