Categories
cybernetics

Convergent Stupidity

The phenomenon of societal ‘dumbing down’ is undeniable. While terms like “uninformed” or “disengaged” may seem too blunt, there is a notable drift – both culturally and intellectually – towards a collective state that is increasingly indifferent, uninspired, and detached from genuine engagement with one another. And yet, this shift is layered beneath a polished […]

Categories
cybernetics Philosophy

Philosophy of Information Systems

We are bound by physics as much as by logic to serially and partially approximate to the center of a representational and/or referential, relational network and distribution. An unexamined enigma: this approximation to a systemic, semiotic or otherwise communicative barycenter is an expression of the principle of Least Action, in the relational dynamics of information […]

Categories
cybernetics

Navigating the Unsolvable: A Comprehensive Exploration of Systems Theory, Cybernetics, and the Patterns of Complex Problems

Introduction In an era marked by unprecedented complexity, the quest to understand and address significant problems remains at the forefront of human endeavor. These problems—spanning disciplines such as physics, biology, mathematics, philosophy, and ecology—often defy permanent solutions. They are dynamic, evolving as we interact with them, and they challenge our conventional approaches to problem-solving. Amidst […]

Categories
cybernetics

Generative Introspection

Having widely now gained access to this effectively unbounded as relationally networked complexity in generative computational representation, what are the odds that many if not most of the images and texts produced are used to directly or indirectly embellish, validate and incentivise the development of yet more generative and/or (other, as) downstream communications technology?

Categories
Philosophy

Crowdstrike

We have been building a global communications network and irreversible technological dependency on foundationally insecure technologies. It’s not wilfully stupid or cynically opportunistic entrepreneurialism, the logic itself is working as much against as for us. A big shout-out to sleep-deprived system support and cybersecurity teams everywhere. Not a good day to be working on an […]

Categories
cybernetics

Necessary Alienation and Communication Complexity

As a general observation regarding science and technology, notice that aggregated explanatory toolsets, artefacts, entities and systems are oriented towards the production and self-validation of knowledge in ways that essentially, perhaps irrevocably, alienate us from ourselves and from each other. Rationally orchestrated system- and self-definition amplifies a signal and gradient of information-as-difference, invoking a function […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

The Physics of UFOs

Most certainly, do not simply believe in something simply because it’s a cool or conpelling story. What, however, would it mean for there to be new physics here?

Categories
cybernetics

The Value of Chaos

Generative AI systems provide an interface to the near-unbounded representational, referential and/or relationally networked complexity of ourselves, as historical data and informational or logical abstraction. We struggle cognitively and linguistically with a notion that there is no simply deterministic mapping from input to output in these tools. This is not a bug or failure, it […]

Categories
technology

Future Proofing Education for Technological Change?

There is no “future proof.” It’s like asserting the presence of impermeably secure communications systems. Nothing, if not a nice story… …longer-term visions don’t play the same game in better ways. They rewrite the assumptions and axioms, they reinvent it. It is the unquestioned assumptions that generally hide in plain sight and everyday language. For […]

Categories
narrative

AI, Meaning, Absence

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 […]

Categories
cybernetics

Sickly Sweet Insubstantiality: Generative AI in Popular Music

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 […]

Categories
Philosophy

We are not machines

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 […]