Words acquire meaning from adaptively relational dependency and entanglement with other words and definitions in whichever language, mind or culture they inhabit. Extrapolating this to sentences (and beyond, to narrative and ideology or any other linguistically-mediated system of belief), the combinatorial complexity of referential dependencies quickly becomes effectively unintelligible. A useful mnemonic and metaphor is […]
The music produced here is eminently forgettable, perhaps highlighting a bias of the attention economy towards confectionery-like superficiality. We’re being overwhelmed by a tide of short sharp bursts of information content that lack substantive value or meaning. As a kind of procedural “hollowing out” of ourselves and our diverse histories, this surely poses a risk to the preservation and sustainment […]
It’s an interesting thought that the countless electrochemical systems that sustain life and experience are in some mischievously self-orchestrating sense far smarter than we are. Our own minds do not encompass biological complexity, they are a subset of it. As for artificial intelligence, we should not let its utility and imminent ubiquity deceive us into […]
What if deterrence fails? Here’s a quadruple-shot of caffeine for your Tuesday morning: Every silver lining has a cloud, an occasional series: nuclear science, geostrategic insecurity and civilisation extinction edition. Somewhat, IMHO, more significant than most of the babbling business of communicative noise that sustains social media systems, blogging or vlogging platforms, podcasts, news websites and broadcasters, and yet […]
I suspect that human confusion and belligerent insecurity may be irreducible. This is not to say that these things are endemic or necessary properties of either ourselves, or of the world more generally. It is to suggest that our historical development and evolutionary inheritance has so profoundly entangled intelligence with uncertainty that we are not […]
A literal gold rush moment, but let’s not kid ourselves about the good, the bad and the ugly of it all. The cadence is already beyond effective management: everyone is constantly playing catch up, and – if you read between the lines, this uncertainty is the kernel core of the value and utility of an […]
There are, in general, two main ways to understand a complex system-of-systems. First, as an adaptive constellation of modularly decomposable artefacts, entities and sub-systems as subject to and expressions of orchestration and directed purpose – that is, in terms of its differentiated parts and their relationships. Later, as a bonded, binding proxy organism in which […]
The relationship of new technologies with sustainable organisational learning and growth is not itself new. It’s a journey of adaptive sociotechnical integration that is as beneficial to consider in the strategic whole as it is mandatory to define and refine in the instrumental parts. What is new is that non-linear effects are inevitable at scale. […]
AI is a concept. That concept is, or for all intents and purposes soon will be, everywhere. Cultural systems instruct us in the relational semantics of high-dimensional combinatorial depth without once ever having to complicate it in this way. This is because cultural systems do not copy the blueprint or source code of their contexts […]
Software is a strange beast and yet now so ubiquitously endemic to our human world that we’ve all but become desensitised to its presence and its consequences, even as we struggle to manage dependencies, complexity, security and accelerating supercession. What I think we might be misunderstanding is that software is, much like ourselves, a transmission […]
Generative AI holograms must be inevitable. More than this: it will eventually be possible, perhaps and almost purely as a software and simultaneous optics engineering enterprise, to have holograms target specific audience members. On a software level, machine intelligence and the long tail of data we all inadvertently cultivate by simply existing will lead to […]
Sociotechnical recursion is a concept that captures the deeply interdependent nature of technological and social systems. It describes how these systems are not only connected but are continuously shaping and being shaped by each other in a complex, ongoing cycle. In this view, technology is not merely a tool or a passive artifact; it is […]
Daedelus Kite 