Context: New words – 17 May 2021 These new words and phrases possess little aesthetic merit and less etymological grace but in novel conceptual juxtaposition capture something else that sits quite naturally in a blindspot that lexicographical taxonomies can not, arguably, identify. Observe that this kind of word and word grouping (or abbreviated compression) represents […]
Context: Prometheus’ Toolbox Even if the only way we might ever find technology viscerally intelligible is as just such a Golem of projected corporeal self-inflection, we almost always seem to miss an important point. That which is created or copied and which then endlessly regenerates itself with all the logical necessity of a Von Neumann […]
Context: Is Physical Law an Alien Intelligence? It is a concept on the higher end of a modified Kardashev scale that sufficiently advanced technological intelligence may be indistinguishable from nature itself; effectively – a parallel of the conjecture (in the article linked above) that “life has moved so far on that it doesn’t just appear […]
Science and technology cartwheel and careen past us in ways that few can convincingly argue are fully comprehended, defined or ever anything more than superficially controlled. This accelerating turbulence of complex sociotechnical recursion and self-validating necessity is a self-propagating compression wave of information, energy, technology and concepts. It ripples and oscillates like waves on a […]
Context: How Bill Gates’ company TerraPower is building next-generation nuclear power As a general observation, *anything* which measures safety as “analyzed by deaths per unit of electricity generated” is a worry – it is a normative expectation of inevitable fatality. The technical solution described is interesting and certainly shifts the hazards and juggles the entropy […]
Context: How would we know if an AI is conscious? We find ourselves in an intractable ontological (as much as epistemological) bind here. If we ever get to the point of generating autonomous synthetic information-processing systems that tick all the boxes for notionally proving their possession of consciousness by whatever standard metric we might arbitrarily […]
Context: The revolution in satellite technology means there are swarms of spacecraft no bigger than a loaf of bread in orbit It is a curious property of the juggernaut of relentless technological metamorphosis that utility is generally measured in inverse proportionality to miniaturisation, regardless that a network of associated, integrated systems quite naturally proliferate and […]
Science seeks underlying patterns and abbreviated logical explanations (as equation, model and approximation or general framework) to describe and manipulate nature but this is always at an inadvertent and inverse cost of generating precisely the same quantity of unmanageable complexity and disorder as that control and value or utility it brings. There exists a general […]
War is at least partially a function of the fact that in seeking to maintain sustainable continuity, all dynamical systems must effectively and persistently offset the inevitability of their own internal dissonance and thermodynamic or organisational entropy to an environment composed of other systems that are engaged in precisely the same exercise of existential self-interest. […]
Context: Is China Taking the Lead in AI? I guess it really depends on what we consider progress to be and in what ways such progress is substantive and meaningful or superficial and fragile. It may be an undeniable fact that competition and adversarial sabre-rattling is as profoundly and normatively written into our modern psyches […]
Context: Listening for Extraterrestrial Blah Blah I doubt whether human beings are even a quarter of a percent as smart as we think we are. The indefinitely-extensible properties of logic and mathematics suggest that languages and intelligence on the higher end of the (Kardashev) scale are quite plausibly far too sophisticated for us to interpret […]
Context: The Appearance of Robots Affects Our Perception of the Morality of Their Decisions Curious: “People consider moral decisions made by humanoid robots to be less ethically sound than when another human or traditional-looking robot makes the same decision.” The uncanny valley rides again. This is a particular instance of a general principle. The apperception […]
Daedelus Kite 