Utopian technological fantasies provide precisely an inverse, equal and opposite promise of abbreviated complexity, simplicity, reduced information or cognitive burden from the unmanaged entropy they materially invoke and to which they are often applied as aspirational panacea. Notice here that recurring trope of escape into a world of pure control and endless choice in subjective […]
Context: Superconducting Silicon-Photonic Chip Developed for Quantum Communication It is interesting that there really seems to be no best way of negotiating computation at this scale. The effervescing diversity of technical innovations in this context is instructive. Even as technology converges towards an accelerating point, it radiates out upon as many branches of technical speciation […]
Context: AI Winter I do wonder if we should not (all) be quite so surprised to experience oscillating periods of growth and ossification in any technological endeavour. Notwithstanding expectations of endless growth that align to ascendant paradigms of socioeconomic reality, the tendency of complex systems to periodically decelerate is more than just a measure of […]
The most consequential questions are not those that (only) provide answers but that in so doing invoke many more questions, the most interesting and influential information or artefacts as entities and systems of communication are those that generate more of themselves, and the most successful technologies are those that generate more technologies.
Context: Facebook Changes Name, Announces AR Layer Over Physical Reality Utopian fantasy tends to follow a predictable arc as much in ideology as in technology. The cognitive consequences will be constitutively dissociative and alienating but then, all technology simultaneously empowers and inhibits. A recent study regarding the shrinking of brains some 3,000 years ago aligns […]
The most consequential questions are not those that provide answers but that in so doing invoke many more questions, the most interesting and influential information or artefacts of communication are those that generate more information and artefacts, and the most successful technologies are those that generate more technologies as conceptual or logical ancestry.
Context: Peter Thiel says, forget the hype: Big Tech is slowing down It may be a necessary property of non-trivially sophisticated dynamical systems to oscillate through periods of acceleration and deceleration. Rising complexity in this context is equivalent to acceleration, logically as much as materially; we may quite sensibly speak of self-gravitation in this context. […]
Context: 94% of the universe’s galaxies are permanently beyond our reach The scale of the cosmos is astonishing. Some estimates infer 2 trillion galaxies and some variations of cosmological hyper-inflation (i.e. early expansion) require an infinite Universe. What is most astonishing of all, though and to anyone who stares into this abyss for longer than […]
Context: Pentagon Wants AI to Predict Events Before They Occur If we abstract the concept of pattern formation from its instances, this becomes plausible. This becomes about not specifically determining what is going to happen but rather and as a function of the resonant (i.e. harmonic) symmetries endemic of and to complex systems, where and […]
An enigma: the shambling, self-propagating golem [let’s not kid ourselves – it’s much more Frankenstein than Jetsons] of mass/social communications systems maximally self-propagates and recursively reproduces itself through precisely the dissonant turbulence that we are now obligated to engage as both an existential threat and aperture of opportunity. How, in other words, to bootstrap, loop […]
Context: Guess who’s the biggest investor in self-driving tech? As a general (and perhaps self-evident) observation, note that the sum total of investment at $44 billion would achieve so much more if one company had those resources pooled but that, enigmatically, it is precisely the difference and competition which is driving the acceleration in this […]
Context: Brave new Netherlands: This Dutch AI start-up is changing healthcare Michel Foucault‘s observations on the role and nature of surveillance and knowledge were quite on point in regards to this. The nature of a disciplinary/regulatory and /or cybernetic system of social control is such that what occurs in health quickly permeates and percolates through […]
Daedelus Kite 