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 […]
Tag: technology
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 […]
Context: Unity unveils Metacast real-time 3D platform for sports broadcasts What fascinates me about this is that it illustrates precisely how the essence of technology is the expansion of the interior, internal and logical spaces we (quite literally and subjectively as much as cognitively) inhabit. A little like people first entering the TARDIS on Doctor […]
Context: Elon Musk Insists on Autonowashing, Says Tesla Will License Autonomy to Anyone Commercial value is, perhaps, always a function of the difference(s) between aspiration and reality. Marketing as entrepreneurial exercise of relatively shameless self-promotion always and already presupposes the existence of some future state and well-polished (generally Utopian) fantasy upon which narrative (and prospective […]
Facebook’s recent network faux pas and serial fall(s) from grace led to an observation of culture, technology and psychology in a world that is anything other than resilient to change or catastrophic disturbance: Human beings are never quite so happy as when they double down on unsustainable or profoundly fragile and insecure systems that can […]
Unable to focus on singular topics or projects for very long, was Leonardo da Vinci an embodiment of innovation as a specialist generalist for the information age, 500 years too early; or, was an information and technology revolution 500 years too late? Beyond wistful anecdotes and instructive historical vignettes, it is useful to consider that […]
Context: Can SenseTime become a Chinese AI champion? Success here being defined as much by the extent to which a corporation becomes a compliant appendage of state control as by technical expertise. It’s a strange game – the control systems being fielded will gradually become the axioms of political power; what is successful as applications […]
Context: DeepMind’s AI predicts almost exactly when and where it’s going to rain Question: To what extent the modelling and simulation approximates to the actual systems complexity involved. Probabilistic, predictive within margins of error endemic to deep learning and here provides a 90 minute window of warning in this system. Granted, thermodynamic turbulence and irreducible […]
Context: Deep Learning’s Diminishing Returns Rolf Landauer coined the phrase that information is physical. The consequences being that all computation and sophisticated or automated statistical analysis at scale has similar costs, at scale. Diminishing returns is a function of the second law of thermodynamics. The article’s observation that “new approaches” are required is accurate. Are […]
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Cybersecurity is an Infinite Game
Context: How quantum security generates randomness to shield IoT systems It strikes me as equal parts interesting and enigmatic that the implicit uncertainty of an abstraction (and extraction) of entropy as randomness upon which we must build our certainties of assurance in information security indicates a profoundly mischievous and rarely, if ever, acknowledged ontological fact. […]
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Natural Technology
The long journey of technological civilisation is shaped by a curious and generally unacknowledged enigma that the most sophisticated technologies will almost always approximate to natural, physical and environmental systems that already exist. We should perhaps be unsurprised that technology converges towards the elegant sophistication, efficiency and eloquent complexity of nature. We might be even […]
Daedelus Kite 