Humanity is moving through a narrow and dangerous passage. Environmental damage, political instability, rapid technological change, and economic pressure are all rising at once. Energy use is climbing, ecosystems are under strain, information systems are flooded with polarising noise, and institutions are struggling to keep pace. A major driver of this acceleration is corporate greed […]
Entropy, and only entropy, is king. Highly ordered information systems do not rest on harmony. They are grounded in dissonance, volatility, and conflict, just as is extreme wealth sustained by the presence of its antithesis, the incoherent becoming, and always having been, the transmission medium of its inverse. This is not metaphor. It is structural. […]
Consider artificial intelligence and capitalism together, not as separate forces but as mutually reinforcing dynamics, where automation becomes the primary mechanism for enforcing scale-dependent profitability. Technologically mediated commercial systems were always likely to converge on something like this. AI is not an aberration. It is a natural extension of a system that prioritises speed, scale, […]
Thousands are protesting in Ladakh, India, demanding constitutional provisions to protect the region’s ecology and autonomy over land and agriculture decisions. The region, affected by climate change and territorial disputes, is seeing worsened conditions due to militarisation. Activist Sonam Wangchuk is leading a “climate fast” in freezing temperatures to highlight these issues. The protesters seek statehood and […]
We rarely pause for thought to consider that all of this accelerating sociotechnical speciation and generative utility precisely is the drift through combinatorial complexity into states of maximum entropy. It remains as something of a collective (perhaps collaborative) blindspot that organisational order is profoundly dependent upon unrecoverable loss and stochastic uncertainty. The same observation applies […]
Context: How will the Universe end? Cosmological evanescence as measured against the eternal darkness and endlessly meaningless expanses of infinite duration without life, experience or purpose. I expect the podcast might both begin and end with the generative complexity and radiating dissipative properties of thermodynamic entropy but I wonder how such vast existential facts can […]
The cognitive potential of any system is not so much a product of its informational architecture as it is a function of the dissipative dynamics that sustain it. This is where the black box of intelligence comes in – it is not so much a lack in our understanding of how the brain works, but […]
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 […]
Context: Climate change: 2020 in a dead heat for world’s warmest year Climate change has been off the radar for a while, it seems and while the shit-show and train-wreck of 2020 rolls on into 2021, there are some things which seem painfully obvious to me but which also, for whatever reason, seem to be […]
You really have to wonder if senescence and potential (or probable and plausibly inevitable) catastrophic collapse is as necessary in this context as is the endless production of entropy as a corollary of complexity. Any specific system (or system of systems) can only ever maintain sustainable continuity through the offset and displacement of its own internal […]
Perhaps “the centre cannot hold” because there is no centre. Chaos and disorder are far more the native state of material (thermodynamic, dissipative) facts than are the projected order and control around which we reflexively and aspirationally self-validate. Curious, indeed, (and under one perspective) that everything emerging out of the complexity sciences suggests that it […]
It is a truth almost universally known but rarely, if ever, acknowledged that the strengths and the values of our world are simultaneously its weakness and qualitative (as much as quantitative) poverty. Contemporary communications systems have, for instance, been truly wonderous – they have brought us all closer together through near-instaneous text, voice and video […]
Daedelus Kite 