Categories
Philosophy

Predators, Machines and Co-evolution

For many years now, I have been fascinated by the mischievous, mysterious relationship between material systems (like living organisms) and the astoundingly complex information abstractions, systems and relationships within which they quite literally swim. I have mentioned parasitic wasps before – in a related context – but encountered an interesting article today which got me […]

Categories
culture information technology

Information Age: Influence and Deception, the Omnipresence of Conflict

A game of information, influence and seeded (or targeted) turbulence is unlikely to be winnable (or won) by reproducing and reinforcing the structural, organisational components that merely reproduce and self-validate the axioms, grammars and rules of that game. These games are won by rewriting the rules; by extending an existing grammar and logical framework in […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

The Violence Paradox: is this Really a More Peaceful World?

The cost of order is always going to be a certain degree, presence or manifestation of disorder. The notion of a “more peaceful world” is one in which vast numbers of (relatively) small, regional conflicts proliferate, generalisations notwithstanding. There is even, perhaps, a sense in which such distributed conflict is inevitable as a displaced information […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology Philosophy technology

Self-Propagating Technological Metamorphosis

If you listen very carefully you can almost hear a faint whooshing sound as the vacuum created in the wake of the products of our own creative intelligence, which having long ago outpaced us, draws us inexorably along behind it. As the accelerating juggernaut of pure and abstract technological metamorphosis has always – and perhaps […]

Categories
technology

“Centaur” Human/AI Teams to Guard Nasdaq

The Nasdaq will now be protected by a centaur team of human analysts and deep learning systems. The broader context of autonomous network and data system defence is clearly an accelerating arms race. If there is sufficient perceived benefit to be derived to offset the cost of development, which – as the pursuit of profit […]

Categories
culture

Innovation War: Competition, Crime, AI and Security

This is a fascinating domain of analysis: artificial intelligence, cyber security and cyber crime are locked in a spiralling arc of mutual interdependence and reflexive self-definition, an evolving symmetry of mutual causation. The accelerating hyper-inflation of this logical space is complex, dynamic and non-linear.  Asserting core self-organisational principles or symmetries of the self-evident Complex Adaptive […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Continuity of Civilisation

What we more often fail to observe or acknowledge about the generally messy and entropic state of international relations and an apparent inevitability of internecine conflict is that, as a whole, human civilisation is autonomously calculating and computing the optimal means and methods for self-propagation and systemic continuity.  Homeostasis is not engendered through aspiration towards […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

A War Within

It is a commonplace wisdom of strategic thought that no plan ever survives first contact with an enemy. It is true that this is a consequence of the irredeemable nature of complexity and chaos in material and psychological systems, but there is much more to it than this. What is to be said when that […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

The Metaphysics of Climate Change

There are always things beyond the intelligible boundaries of the cognitive logic and cultural grammars within which we live.

Categories
Alien Anthropology Philosophy

Playing the Long-Game of Human Civilisation

The catastrophic entropy of a currently most-probable future is not the only available solution in the possibility-space of all emergent and adaptive human planetary civilisations.

Categories
Philosophy

Productive Entropy

Death is productive in ways that might never be comfortably acknowledged.

Categories
culture

The Hollow Men

One thing I notice about getting older is the way that things start to get away from you…