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Lo and Behold

Not Herzog’s best but certainly, as one would still expect, an insightful and elegant take highlighting some of the most disturbing and techno-ebullient aspects of this technology, a technology that surely marks the cultural tipping point, ushering in the global shit storm that we are now in. The section on AI is fascinating: Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? You know we…

Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind

Publisher’s blurb: “How is it that thoroughly physical material beings such as ourselves can think, dream, feel, create and understand ideas, theories and concepts? How does mere matter give rise to all these non-material mental states, including consciousness itself? An answer to this central question of our existence is emerging at the busy intersection of…

Turing learning

I’ve been thinking about Turing’s lesser-known but still very important other contribution (i.e. to mathematical biology) — so while in Turing groove, I was pleased to come across this open access paper from the latest issue of Swarm Intelligence. So glad to report that Swarm Intelligence has seen through its first decade. Alan TuringArtificial intelligenceCoevolutioncollective behaviorComplex systemsMachine learningmathematical biologySwarm…

Have the monks stopped meditating?

They all seem to be tweeting This observation by Herzog is totemic of what seems to me like a mass self-induced autism, immersed in a vortex of banality, that society has sunk into. When I observe how oblivious people are of reality when out and about with their device, it’s easy to understand why many of us refuse(d) to…

Is Technology Killing Capitalism?

Now isn’t this an interesting title? Well, as I discovered a few weeks back when Sam Harris chatted with Eric, EW comes to things with a very provocative, wise, technically sound and cultured background. The cross hair of software . . . pushes private goods into public goods Artificial intelligencecapitalismEconomicsEPISTEMEEric Weinsteinexpertiseinnovationmathematicssam harristechne

Complexity and Stupidity

Catching up on Sam Harris’ podcasts — this one is of particular interest. Sam’s guest, David Krakauer, I recall from taking the debut Santa Fe Institute freebie course a few years back run by the excellent Melanie Mitchell. Do check out the SFI’s free programmes, notably SFI’s Complexity Explorer: it beats many a fee-paying university course. In any event, if you…