{"about":"Updated Mar 24, 2025. 14145 words, none for you.

TL;DR: maladaptive misanthrope's mountain meditations on maliciously monetized media, mellifluously marketed mediocrity, manifold myopically microfocused masteries, mythical managerial meritocracy, misunderstood misconstruing metastatic multimodal models, mealymouthed martingaled mercenary metropolitan masses, moronic mobs mythologizing malignant manbabies, meaningless multicultural multilateralism masking murderous machinations, multinational macroeconomic monetary manipulation, monotheistic moralizing mendacity, mankind's multitudinous manufactured manic mindlessness...

~~~

I work with research institutions and intergovernmental organizations to understand the emergent macroeconomic impacts and geopolitical risks of algorithmic / stochastic driven global markets / media spheres and on resultant dynamics in inter-systemization to adapt multilingual meta-organizational federated AI augmented platforms for knowledge based collaborative endeavors:

-Intra-organizational enterprise systems analysis, federated collaborative LLM/agentic platform design.

-Multilingual local LLM/agentic NLU domain knowledge process transformation / platform integration.

-Local LLM mgt, deployment, dev virtualization, toolchain, integration, augmentation, prompting, tuning..

~~~ ~~~

Modern infrastructures handle extremely complex processes admirably, and, in various post WWII booms, have undeniably lifted more out of poverty than any other economic system. However, we now face the undeniable need to reduce the massive extraction, waste and byproduct damages from them by multiples of the recent pandemic, which rocked our socioeconomic order, for decades, not years. As wonderful as technology is, this is a crisis in fundamental assumptions underlying how we organize our economic systems - going to the heart of our human nature..

The core problem is that our identity and our very survival as modern humans is driven by global financial diktat reducing all human endeavors to stark choices of infinitely increasing profits or rapid unscheduled devaluing, and, now that it is broadly understood in the sciences that the rich world must stop consuming in this manner to save our anthropic ecology, it begs the question of what motive we humans can muster to counter this runaway system without destroying ourselves in the process.

The underlying operants enabling this are of course the reformed and now deeply sublimated triad of faiths, nationalisms and corporations that prop the whole extractive neverending prosperity fantasy which is the nexus of all the extremes that generate all the desires and hatreds that, in turn generate the votes, still vital to the pretense of democracy, all on surreptitiously surveilling screens, while the very epistemology of our species' values is polarized and auctioned to transnational hucksters..

The platforms this vile superstructure props up are where we must, like it or not, live - or at least operate - and, whether it was McCarthy on the major networks or Musk on Xittified social media, those who abstain find themselves mooted by majority mass mob rule in the market.. and the forum. America loves to tout its freedom, but I wonder when (well, if) a meaningful plurality will realize that freedom to recapitulate pointless parochial patriotic border struggles as distractions while plutocrats gut democracy isn't freedom at all.

Growing up in broadcast media’s senescence and developing professionally during social media’s terrible infancy, I have found that, despite unfathomable changes of the industrial revolution as it ground up and commoditized the natural philosophy of the Enlightenment, whose sciences it usurped, it is in the several decades since our last global war - and especially the few that I’ve witnessed - that our remaining common values are most imperiled..

Let us recall the prescient legacy of the centenarian president who first warned Americans of their consumerist crisis of character that (ever since and much moreso now) threatens humanity's future, thereby dooming his own reelection.. Now as we try to comprehend the spectacle of the first convicted felon (RE!!)occupying that same high office after cheering on the first insurrection in American history to breach the Capitol, and as his down payment on ‘retribution’ frees and emboldens those who violently assaulted the police defending the Capitol, and as surveillance capitalist oligarchs gather like venture capitalist vultures to cheer on - and capitalize on - the tear-it-all-down chaos, we might also consider just whose chateaubriand we so doggedly turn..

As lamentable as the greatest academies of Western civilization now churning out myopic, disillusioned vocational drones bred to the wheel/cubicle and prodded by hot coals/credit scores may be, it would be understandable if it were some great collective sacrifice to save the environment we're evolved to for our children and grandchildren.. that it is actually technological greed enhancement should shock us like other atrocities where technology enabled the banality of evil.. that it doesn't is mute testament to the futility of asking those turning the spit to think beyond hot coals in the wheel and roasting meat in the nostrils.

Even if it goes against our dogged upbringings, let's ignore the credit coals and roasting stock option smells and look outside of the cubicle wheels to trace the tech threads and financiers’ unseen hands and ask just how far we can constrain our progeny’s options with our selfish consumerism and how deep we can erode the greatest technology humanity has yet created as surveillance data extraction platforms before the short term selfish ecological and societal atrocities intersect the latent nuclear ICBM atrocity our forebears bequeathed us.

Technology enables science, but is fundamentally science applied to human ends – and inextricable from the organizations and leaders who implement it.. and the character of its users / customers.. who are now its products. We should consider this carefully as we assess the social changes we've observed through screens that observe us as we gaze glassy eyed into them, and the underlying social surveillance infrastructure that now is completely unleashed to amplify and profit from the loudest and least informed as those who speak carefully based on deep factual understanding are mooted by the chaos clown circus..

~~~

Tragedia Banale: Cyberexile in 13 Circles of An Anthropic 3°C++ Inferno

Epistemological discrimination in peer reviewed disciplines is surely the highest expression of our quest to know ourselves and our world. The somewhat less than scientific discrimination based on perceived 'hardness' of one's discipline, while unhelpful, is nevertheless relevant if we wish to consider the culture of scientific endeavors from disciplines considered 'hard' such as computer science through contested areas such as economics and on into the so called 'soft' sciences such as political science.. This bias against social or political areas of inquiry in 'hard' science will have grave implications for society as the technology that flows from advances in areas such as computer science continues to be uncritically applied to what has already become an information revolution on par with the industrial and agricultural revolutions that preceded it.. The laissez faire commercialization of internet communications, contrary to the promise of a global knowledge renaissance, now threatens democracy, modern acceptance of science, and possibly even humanity itself - showing the urgent need for even a millionth of the design put into FAANG/BAT to be put to the educational and administrative knowledge organizations caught up in the global scale algorithmic behavior modification schemes running amok in society.

Even now, the lingering 'commonsense' of Gilded Age "beggar thy neighbor" capitalism and Postwar "consume with more vulgarity than thy neighbor" consumerist propaganda mean AI in society cannot but sow trepidation under all the hype: as algorithmic, behaviorally addictive entertainments and conveniences that remove the difficult tasks of thinking are offered by trillion dollar corporations with resources beyond developed nation states, we default to continuing and even expanding the mass production economies that threaten our place on this planet.. GAI may not become AGI, but it is already emerging to catalyze a new trillionaire dystopian capitalism and will inevitably evolve along humanity's inflamed, darkened behavioral patterns on polarized social media, severely testing science, journalism and ultimately social cohesion on the way to to twisting human nature into The Cybernetic Misinformation Age's ill-informed, dimwitted, dissipated prediabetic handmaid..

Although it is certainly true that we cannot manage what we cannot measure, and that the modern era's historically unprecedented rise in productivity that has saved humanity from its previously uncontrollable rise in population could not be accomplished except by the advances in various technologies that characterize the developed world, ecological science, from Mann's iconic 'hockey stick' thru the refinements and extension of it to map the last 24kya, unequivocally show that, while data and the scientific process may well further optimization theories, they most certainly do not support an 'optimization philosophy' as we have been conned into embracing, now that the majority of the developed world's populations are algorithmically absent any desire to think more deeply.. This situation serves deca and centa billionaires looking to become the world's first trillionaire, but we may want to consider the global history and future trajectories of societies' relations to knowledge, the resultant applications in our global technological systems and their impacts on human organization just a teeny bit as we stare into the stormy abyss of anthropogenic crisis triggered Armageddon.

In the last half millennium humanity has achieved hard won intellectual, organizational and personal liberty. Sadly, in our age of surveillance capitalism, just when we need to use our technological prowess and build global organizations up to face global problems and transcend anachronistic past hindrances such as religion and nationalism to constrain the current scourge of consumerism and the resurgent scourge of authoritarianism, we instead demonstrate profound lack of appreciation for - much less interest in - making any further collective intellectual progress as any useful part of our necessarily global polity, even when we now have the best chance in the history of our species to develop tools to relegate multinationally metastatic mass-market acquisitivism and resurgent retrograde revanchist authoritarianism to the dustbin of history where they belong – before AI carries them beyond the religious wars Gutenberg's and the global nationalist ones Marconi's tech fueled, if not touched off..

As successive societies rose from the ashes of the chaotic collapse of their predecessors, it is easy to forget that this ‘natural’ progression of technologies occurred prior to the megaton nuclear MIRV tipped ICBMs our parents developed - and the autonomous distributed triggers our children, still stuck in this MAD club will inevitably develop.. ..by the time of Alexander we had a European pattern for those successions that carried us right through Caesars, Napoleons, and the Victorians’ definitely not imperialist stepchildren's Versailles, Potsdam, 38th parallel silly lies of lines drawn across the globe that we believe so patriotically in today.. an idiotic situation where we are blinded to the climactic changes transcending the imaginary utterly unviable ‘states’ they delineate - and to the hidden reality of transnational global power.

The techno Thucydidean collision of technologies and imaginary lines in the sand between rising surveillance driven authoritarianism and fibrilating remains of democracy in the social media addled surveillance capitalist global financial sovereigns’ new reality is existential.. We might ask ourselves what crass collective credulity could countenance a generative ICT invasion of countless communities' conversations by surveillance oligarchs who owe their power to monitoring, manipulating and monetizing human interactions? The billionaires behind our techno oligarchy evidently think it's a great opportunity to replace what remains of the democracy and fiduciary stability we've managed since the Renaissance with openly corrupt buffoons reified by Bitcoin scammers and surveillance capitalists bent on creating an AI driven antisystem cryptoconspiratorial idiot nation as a playground for the chuckleheaded ideas of ahistorical egopolitical multibillionaire uberbrogrammers to fiddle with their joysticks in from megayachts and superbunkers as they watch the rest of the world burn..

It's only in the industrial age that charismatic speaking stops being seen as antidemocratic dangerous demagoguery and, in the Robber Baron railroad mega metropolises that both anonymized masses of workers and mobilized the preachers and politicians who manipulated them, forges modern mass manipulation ‘say anything’ leadership styles and sows the seeds for future fireside chats, televised debates, daisy plucking commercials,.. presaging the golden escalator ride down into entertainment politics and the cult of mediated personality.. which devolved the party that once preached ‘peace through strength’ to ‘peace through sycophancy’, and its dull-normal deplorables demographic openly cheering the destruction of the infrastructure they (witlessly) rely on by Armageddonist techno-emperors at home and a shredding of the multilateral relationships that literally made American great by morally bankrupt mentally deranged autocrat lickspittles abroad..

That we allow isolated, imperious, insensitive, idiotsavants such unfettered power that they could cravenly concoct simultaneous surreptitious extraction of trillions in media revenue from others' personal and creative data with shameless dark pattern hucksterism of anything from toilet paper thru tech work to the very people whose careers, information and entertainment sources they are enthusiastically enshittifying - all while exploiting second language third world subsistence level psycho sweatshop content tagging, generation, 'moderation' abroad and resurfacing the wheels of social / online / digital commerce with revolving ranks of retread, certifiable, imbalanced, anally retentive crypto flaggart tech tyrant wannabes here, reveals much (possibly more than those who value education beyond mere vocational technology can stomach) about the ‘industry’ that has accreted around social / generative media profiteers..

Those accretions can be seen in the flora and fauna of the fora that such tech types frequent.. like the local strains proudly displaying their techno tribalism and incel techbro fanboi pseudointellectual perception of what is relevant/political while furiously flagellating in this microscopic microcosm (flagging peer review content from Cambridge and Oxford or with comical bias screaming Duuuupe! about posts without upvotes as quadposted entries flood the frontpage ;) who are being perfect.. well, dupes, dutifully volunteering the dirty work of construction (one hesitates to refer to architecture in virally emergent environments) - along with the apparently vital larger software community chores of corporate conformity enforcement, censure, ostracization, etc evidently necessary for maintaining supplies of supplicant software sweatshops in the perfect RTO maximized keystroke counting bathroom timing supple and spreadable consistency to satisfy the spreadsheets of tomorrow's cloudy virtualization oligarch vision.

This, together with the one percenters’ neverending SUV, HVAC, iConsume, eDiabetes prosperity gospel behavioral imperialism and other proto fascist pseudo Taylorisms the numerically suggestible (the whole knowledge vs wisdom thing apparently absent in today's mathematical modeling curricula) are naturally susceptible to seems sufficient to Make America’s cube farm tech Great Again.. and allow their Dilbert gopher denizens to still somehow expect to escape from the inevitable blowback in their cul-de-sac-ed cargo cult cheap copies of the extravagant, expensively exclusive enclaves – or even the blatantly phallic rocket competition billionaire flights of fantasy they eagerly emulate with meme stocks and Cyber-Edsels when climate change consequences crash into the uber-techno Idiocracies they created and burn down the whole extractive VC Ponzi scheme with some as yet unpredictable triggers for use of somewhat older MIRVed rockets..

The meritocratic CERN core of the open Internet still exists under the social media strangling it.. as with all human technology, from language and writing to the LLMs we're fumbling with today, value is not in specific technical masteries, but in deeper understanding of the accretive human implications of each technology: the literature of ancient Mesopotamia is suffused through the literature of the entire ancient world and still with us today; the technology of cuneiform itself was lost millenia ago and is only of interest to archaeologists today. So it is for technologies - so long as we manage not to allow them to rip apart the very fabric of our civil societies, which we seem to have forgotten hold back the worst of our all too human nature..

Philopseudes: (algorithmically summoning sorcerer spirits)

ICTs, while different from all previous forms of human communication technology by dint of their being algorithmically manipulated (and now stochastically replicated), are still interactions between humans, and, as such, define our societies. Of course, the other great difference is that they operate instantaneously and at global scale, and since, outside of authoritarian subsidy for state ends, this cannot be sustained except by monetization, there must be ad revenue (because as journalists know, subscribers do not scale), and for there to be ad revenue, there must be engagement - at any and all costs. The net result is all too clear today: media forced to prioritize only what keeps users through the ads, fostering an entire hidden industry festering around the dark patterns that feed the most simplistic human interactions possible - with the all too predictable side effect of globalized polarization in the extreme.

Now, when we are literally living in a matrix of global scale unmanaged corporate social experiments into the very nature of human intelligence and communication, the philosophical - and even existential - implications of marrying GAI to the already toxic social media infrastructure we backed our way into through a race to the bottom of behavioral manipulation between trillion dollar surveillance capitalists and authoritarian regimes is completely unknowable.. All that can be said, at least from the perspective of modern scribes literate in these technologies, is that this surely is the last best chance to work towards real understanding (as opposed to mere technical mastery in pursuit of remuneration) and toward the creation of systems that take into account the global scale at which we are operating - not to maximize billionaire profits - but to bring them in line with the global cybernetics of our societies and the ecosystem they rely on.. If not, this regime of behavioral manipulation fueling a mercantile resurgence of extractive industries to feed global consumerism will soon enough lurch toward a completely pointless global conflict over resources exactly and precisely because we are too polarized and too consumerized to make the real changes that could save our species' future.. Cuneiform marked the dawn of property and law - will this wave of technology mark its end?

Sadly, as we see so clearly here at HN, even otherwise highly skilled knowledge workers are not immune to algorithmically enhanced tribal 'common sense' beyond their areas of expertise, such as blatant self serving “no but I really did earn my consumerist attaboy brand name badges!” biases when actual economic data - independent of the last century of theatrical Marxist / Capitalist propaganda parade - do not support anything beyond the rise of global living in this period being directly predicated on stable, transparent financing of basic science to guide transnational infrastructure improvement.. The rest, from Calvinism to Communism thru today's easy money techno fabulism, are mere failures of governance. Useful analysis beyond such propaganda is neither technical minutia in monographs nor broad infotainment pieces, but rather integrative research into the broader impacts of science in society - the crisis is that the former find industrial use or commercial outlets in modern media, the latter does not. For all the excellent cross discipline research into the systemic challenges of anthropogenic climate change, society remains unconvinced, which must change if we are to move from research to effective policy.. A mistrusting, ill educated populace is well suited to outraged engagement strategies, but not complex science policy discussions on global scale multigenerational infrastructure we rely on..

Media evisceration in the Internet Age has effectively denatured the fourth estate. What had seemed to be an inevitable process of innovation followed by consolidation like industrial printing, radio and TV broadcasting before, instead led to uselessly proliferating crass cable channels and the supernova of user content / streaming platforms.. Entertainment is now sold as subscription services with much investor interest, but news media are withering in the face of consumer polling driven infotainment and outright lies. This has been heralded as a great democratization of information, most loudly by those who profit from sensationalism and those billionaires addicted to constant online attention.

Communication about science is vital to make any policy assessments of research as a whole, which, in turn, is vital to development and governance of the processes and technologies that will shape our future, to say nothing of research processes assessing future impacts of the technologies we have.. Sites like HN offer the promise of an alternative based on intellectual curiosity focused on technology, but rely on the skill of journalists and editors (much more than they realize) and risk missing the bigger picture for all the luminary eulogies, privacy/takedown notices, charming mechanical diagrams, shiny techno ephemera..

When we look more broadly, beyond those (well represented in technology and engineering) who express bias for 'hard' sciences, and consider instead the culture of the capital markets that, from sovereign funds to pension funds, are behind institutional research budgets, IPOs, etc. funding science and technology, here, the 'character' of their sociology (sociopathy, really) is eerily similar to that of aggressively aggregating agrarians in the ancient age of nascent empire, who, without a second (or first) thought, took the bounty of the commons under the aegis of each era's empires' gods, ultimately leaving us a subliminal pastiche of accretive fairytale values that are so thoroughly rooted in our business thinking that it is almost impossible for the financial system to acknowledge the exponentially expansive extractive reality behind the easy money fantasy.

In a generation, global population is projected at over 10 billion, with 3/4 in cities - an over 50% increase in urbanization. Construction needs for concrete, steel, etc, to say nothing of fuel use, transport infrastructure, supply chains.. - all while desperately trying to reduce emissions - requires careful consideration of ways we may use information systems to collectively develop such infrastructure in a manner which is much more intelligent than quick returns driven wasteful sprawl - and reconsideration of the global financial system's role, especially credit policy since the global financial crisis, which drives infrastructure technology decisions.. There is always political support for stimulus, but rarely any for the tightening that must come at some point. We must decide if financial institutions dependent on globally untraceable liquidity chasing profits above all else are best for future financial technology infrastructure that ultimately relies on (preys on) G7 democratic governance or if we will reclaim this collective governance of these institutions to save our planet..

As developed nations at the forefront of this mess, we must simultaneously save what we have developed from climate change while protecting it from resurgent retrograde revanchists our social media VC bubble has enabled.. Success will show the world how scientific objectivity and the subjective values of well developed cultures interact effectively, as was once clearly seen in the rise of our liberal democracies since the Enlightenment and our knowledge economies since WWII. The infrastructure of good governance we have worked so hard for through these eras is being eroded: while we can still manage to avoid being overwhelmed by polarization (to the extent idealistic technologists are willing to work around governments and corporations), we must advocate for the open technology infrastructure of collective knowledge and meritocratic values essential to our continued intellectual progress.

Eisenhower warned us about the military industrial complex; Biden just warned us about the oligarchy threatening our democracy in the looming tech-industrial complex.. both were right, both were too late.. There are stacks full of history tracing the great technologies that have their origins in warfare, fewer academics seem prepared to ask what our proclivities towards murderous innovation on megadeath scale means for our odds in the ‘great filter' - or what it means to our impending innovation in intelligences beyond our own.. Leonardo da Vinci, who himself stands at the dawn of the age when we shed the religious rationalizations we covered our savageness towards ourselves and the animals totally dependent on us with, nevertheless was fascinated by machines of warfare whose intended use horrified and disgusted him.. so it was with the geniuses behind the still haltingly begun nuclear age.. so human nature dictates it must be now with AI, where generative AI, which is finding its way into the corpora of peer reviewed science, will likely obscure the critical points of this soon enough..

This may not (or may) affect the core of the 'hard' sciences, but in the social sciences, many of which are still burdened with theoretical frameworks, that, even worse than the so called hard sciences now near ubiquitous funder fawning streetlight effect halos, contort themselves into pretzels in groupthink circlejerks that would make Soviets and Inquisitors alike beam with satisfaction.. Exposed as they now are to the social media salients of the interfaces between science and society, this can only portend a series of social science policy disasters.. Today, as the few remaining journalistic organizations with high standards and deep cultural integrity are forced to hide behind pay walls or beg for donations, we find ourselves on the cusp of a golden age of disinformation where autonomous systems can convincingly engage on every online forum and where anything not peer reviewed or published by the dwindling handful of reputed journalists will be suspect. Thus LLMs in polities commercially conditioned to react uncritically mean that in cases where science must inform policy - a deluge of polarizing distractions and corner case dithering will fibrillate deliberative bodies, rendering real science moot.

Enterprise: (hi-tech great power games for fun and profit)

Though the corporate world only sees universities and sources of exploitable research and protoworkers, they are in reality the most viable forms of organization to address the complex collective existential problems we are facing on a global basis.. It would be wonderful if the UN and the constellations of NGOs were up to the task, but the very same corrosive social dynamics destroying democracy now made short work of such organizations.. Thus it is the transnational federation of universities and other knowledge based organizations that we must turn to for science backed governance of these global issues.. Technological complexity can make transnational federated systems unmanageable; when large integrations of projects span many organizations, preventing this must be done with integrative insights into the overall system, not mere project refactoring. However, as we have seen in the most recent decade of democratic dissolutuon in Western civilization, there are critical unwritten aspects of governance that cannot be reduced to voters and dollars.. In government it is likely too late to resurrect character - and patently impossible to legislate it.. hopefully academia can still rise above our dying democracies and academia can still enlighten values for cooperation between projects that go beyond mere technical objectives (as we can now hopefully see that all information systems for meaningful collaboration must) – and hopefully there are enough people who have the vision, values and vocational expertise to build a future of transnational federation worthy of our species and up to the challenges we face..

Without a vision of this caliber, the very types of complex multilateral federation between corporations, research and regulatory institutions that will be the only way we as a species can even begin to address climate change are completely outside realistic consideration.. In our global systems no country or culture can exert moral authority as in times now long gone.. If this is left to corporations and governments, the resultant social imperatives of monetization in the former and politicization in the latter prove corrosive to the very systems that the technology was intended to address. The governance of socio-technological systems may not appeal to engineers or VCs, but as neither market valuation oriented corporate policy nor partisan politics driven legislation are likely to reduce this to an engineering or startup type problem, intra organizational systems will have ongoing need for cybernetic research based technology governance.. allowing the socio-political technical 'realities' of late stage corporate capitalism to crash headlong into the much more significant reality of the consequences of anthropogenic climate change will be the greatest man made disaster yet..

Is there anyone who looks at our governance from the macro perspective and thinks that the existing systems can see us through the changes we must make to even begin to address climate change..? a pandemic with significant and persistent lethality..? the war we find ourselves in on the European continent..? This is, of course, saying nothing of the deep demographic, infrastructure and other environmental problems we now face.. It is somewhat amusing to see that the West, in addition to being blind to the inherent incompatibility of relying on the global natural commons to buffer the externalities of their industrial expansion and the systems of private ownership they colonized under, now seem so shocked that the corroded remnants of their long assumed defaults of now defunct Christian 'morals' they buffered rapacious business practices with are being replaced by a rogues' gallery of conspiracy theories at home and malicious retrograde whataboutisms abroad.. The developed world is making much more progress exporting consumerism than liberal democracy - especially as it now seems hell bent on destroying the institutions and traditions essential to democracy at home..

The nature of the problem is easily understood by considering that this was, from DARPA to CERN and GNU through Mozilla, developed by western governments and open community programs - and then repurposed for business by 'monetization', which, despite many innovative products, inevitably devolves into the type of rentier utility that, in the realm of human information communication, needs must move society towards repeatable revenue prioritizing engagement and away from the deeply considered, thoughtful collaboration that the research organizations who originally developed web technologies practiced.. Is it any wonder that this process of monitoring and manipulation also catalyzed the adoption / adaptations of this infrastructure for authoritarian regimes?

The greatest irony is that we, as a now irrevocably global community, must collaborate - or not - using these technologies - just as techno oligarchs have, AGI red herrings notwithstanding, gathered the unregulated technologies and unhindered powers needed to implement their ‘networked state’ uberdystopian fantasies…this decade determines if we solve our contention in science based integrated world organizations.. or, following the climactic, and governance trends of the first half, if not, sooner or later in WWIII..

Although mass intra-tribal atrocities surely predate our species, ritual sacrifice is unique to us and surely flows from the practical and conceptual changes that attend raising captive animals.. changes which are the origin of all human religions.. in the post-industrial world,the break in the human - animal bond that characterized 5 millennia of human mobility was equally significant, if limited to a much smaller segment of the species, which we commonly refer to as the developed world today.. As with the difference between the hunt of hunter gatherers and the ritually rationalized murders of the pastoralists, the social effects of the stark bifurcations between moving by one's own muscles and wit or establishing an intimate relationship with an animal far larger, faster and more powerful than oneself versus being hauled in essentially cushioned cattle cars or unleashing the violence of horseless carriages on the countryside cannot be overstated and although they come much too late in history for humans to accept the cultish absurdities of a new religion, America's gashole culture can be seen as at least as damaging as the traditional monotheist silliness.. in fact, it is only now that the the self serving credulousness of religio-nationalisms, the ludicrously aggressive egocentrism of gashole culture and the techo oligarch surveillance capitalist matrixes of carefully crafted credulous career, consumer and congregate identities efficiently monetizing and managing masses of 'human resources' are congealing into a magically multicolored cloak on the naked aggression iron fisting the velvety generative gloves of our emergent techno authoritarian oligarchs..

From Gutenberg / Vanini to Zuckerberg / Musk, our struggle to become enlightened knowledge societies shows that our global systems of governance retrofitted on trade deal patchworks of technology, information, finance law are no match for today's billionaires and kleptocrats.. The greatest irony of our time is not this gleefully crass celebration of obscene vulgarity as our planet burns on the techno robber baron resurgence of extractive excess, but rather the flaccid response of the technological era to the postwar death of idealistic philosophy.. The prewar attempts to rework the capital systems of the day may have been hopelessly misguided and culpable in the ensuing conflagration, but at least they stood for _something _ Diversity for diversity's sake (as with similar pointless abstraction of art and literature into featureless funhouse mirror temples to the myth of equality) and the comical attempts to drown out the dark reality of the imperialist legacy in our borders with meaningless international happy talk are both politically correct - and perfect patsies for the resurrection of the grievance theater that incubated the extremism of the previous century's '30s, as our '30s rapidly darken and chances of real meritocratic reform fade fast..

Latent human nature means ICT that holds the promise of uniting our species has, on balance, imperiled our future just as surely as our harnessing of the power of the atom has.. To understand this, we must first look back into human prehistory to understand dynamics of the rise of collective agriculture through shared beliefs that catalyzed written languages (our first ICT).. Archaeologists are using technology like LiDAR and archaeogenetics to greatly advance our understanding of human prehistory; now we have before us the truly epic challenge to understand our humanity from the deep and wide perspectives that analysis of our entire written history - and even its latent antecedents gives us. We must apply that knowledge to bring our collective behavior away from the predictable calamity of our past and towards information systems that further the creation of empirical, verifiable goals from consensus of global collaborations and protects against media that distort toward external financial or political imperatives instead of acting as a medium for information. This imperative transcends hype cycles, political cycles, and the technofabulism, bothsiderism, etc., that pass for news coverage in this corporate wasteland media environment.. There are no tech fixes, and there are no political solutions when no one is able to see and actually say that craven destruction of democracy and the poisoning of academic and news organizations are both corrosive to our future..

We can now quantitatively analyze and model the very images and words that are the artifacts of culture just as we would any other large dataset - failing to use these tools to reassert the core values of the academy against unedited, unreviewed, unthinking public memespew is hugely damaging to the future of knowledge institutions - just as the algorithmic / generative revolutions remaking (social(ized!?!))media industries are to public science understanding. This gridlock of cacophony means that the future of knowledge collaboration will be won or lost far from increasingly populist, polarized, pointless political proceedings and instead by default in the architecture where the ICT/IS all knowledge organizations rely on actually takes form..

Profess(ion): (fulminating fugues on our fast fading future)

Software architecture, as it is (mostly not) taught and, crucially, as it undergirds the global mission of academia writ large (possibly the least considered aspect of the discipline), must be of direct benefit to project teams (which it is mostly not), but that is only one set of metrics.. To be of use to our future as a global community, those who practice it must be informed by a deep and broad understanding of our use of information systems to organize throughout our history and even our prehistory.. ..and then, must fearlessly advocate for what matters - in C-suite white paper weasel speak, on published research and most importantly from code reviews and log files with the engineering groups all the way through the communication appropriate to any and all stakeholders in the relevant projects. This is no more something to be dumped on devops than it was a place to dump ‘senior’ devs who can't manage people - or non-technical communication, nor is it a vehicle for slimy consultants selling 4GL/UML tools, TOGAF evangelists, etc.. Software architecture needs to be central to the future of the global digitization efforts in all large organizations; and, like other so called soft science - including economics - is not soft because it is easy, but rather because it is broad and amorphous, and like economics (and unlike the other soft sciences) it is characterized by direct interconnectedness to complex quantifiable infrastructures.. Making it essential to really understand the meaning of the changes enterprise information systems will inevitably be subject to as agentic systems initiatives outpace analysis and wash unheeding over the embedded undocumented knowledge in petabytes of legacy codebases worldwide..

We have inherited systems of government and corporate organization that most often have their origins in reactions to world wars and global economic collapses and, when all the legal complexity is peeled back, are political compromises papering over our long legacy of dictators and robber barons. Today, we are having trouble even managing those.. Instead, we debate made up non-issues and fear the next black swan amidst the deafening roar of grey rhinos rumbling in from all sides.. As these institutions become more complex and connected - and because of the global infrastructure we have allowed to proliferate in our ‘profits above all else’ VC values techno oligarchy, inevitably also become more inept - and as these problems close in, the sheer exponential complexity of our future information infrastructure will confer increasing control by default to those who claim to have the ability to deliver understanding - or at least manage to orchestrate - these constellations of complex systems..

Actually getting this right (for an architecturally sound, socially relevant, and epistemologically valid conceptual construction of right) is vocation as was known before the implicitly arrogant topdown Taylorisms of industrialized work, and returns the pursuit of knowledge to preeminence in work as it was for those who chose to pursue it throughout the Enlightenment, an era that generated thinking which led, even if haltingly, to rising human development based on globalizing systems of ever freer peoples replacing religious superstition with science. Now as the scientific collaboration that is our inheritance of that era shows we must preserve the ecology we evolved in, the very systems of merit based trust that are the legacy of the Enlightenment and limn our systems of science, democracy and (fiduciary) finance are under full frontal assault from the techno oligarchy that bankrolled the return of a felon insurrectionist to the highest office in the most powerful of our nation states as a lark while they exercise real power to shape popular political power globally.. This is their follow up to ‘move fast and break things’ a ne plus ultra race to AGI through surveillance technologies that reduce all human interaction to monetizing attention and manipulating behavior by building global socio-technical systems using behavioral dynamics based on mining ancient, even animalistic human urges to drive dystopian generative autonomous ' agentic virtual engagement communities' proliferating polarization for profits and almost certainly destroying what little remains of the shared social bedrock protecting us from Hobbesian chaos.

The 'hacker ideal' is hopefully growing out of the arrogant, adolescent 'fail fast' brogrammer era and will hopefully somehow find its way back to values of collaborative intellectual independence in the sources and stores of information that we rely on.. I start my days (on mountain, rural 5G) with open(ed) reputable sources, checking events on OSINT, and then peer reviewed sources as I build offline archives of information and media that can be referenced, analyzed and enjoyed without biased mediation.. Posting from these to HN is always motivation to consider (and oft-ironic data on) what has real importance as we limn out humanity's future in the technology we choose to develop.

Remaking the global material economy would be - by far - the largest endeavor undertaken by humanity, if we had time left to accomplish it.. The globally destabilizing dislocations that will result from the 3°C+ changes our technologically advanced societies are so clearly incapable of avoiding are only one of the existential threats we face.. From still proliferating ICBMs we seem to have collectively forgotten as the atomic clock ticks towards midnight, to ill defined ideas on intelligence swirling around rapidly burgeoning, completely unregulated technologies in AGI (whatever that may turn out to be) accreting right under the noses of those in the pillage of our now fully engulfed edifice of human creativity and intellectual capital, bleating that “this is fine”, we evidently evolved such ingrained tribalism we would rather burn it all down than let go of our strangle holds on our corporate, political, religious, cults’ cherished propaganda..

These existential threats will only be addressed by collaboration through information systems directly interfacing the world's most contentious political issues. Organization of such large technology projects does not magically happen - proprietary solutions from large corporations must focus on corporate profit - not saving the planet (except for their PR writers) nor are open projects magically invulnerable to global corporate stakeholder political interests - or well served looking beyond their own software metrics.. Large collaborative technology undertakings are critical to the future of society and yet seem to be a blind spot that most think 'the market' will solve.. We are a fully globalized population that somehow clings to delusional economic systems which rely on ever increasing growth in the face of the indisputable fact that we are in a closed planetary system of finite resources. We justifiably praise our previous technology for the billions it lifted from poverty yet refuse to see that today's technology will not - and can not - continue to do so without drastic reductions in our population -- and most of all in our selfish self destructive consumerist disease of Western style consumption - now.

Ignorance of the hard reality here - whether perpetuated by B-school bogus case studies, C-suite propaganda press business books or PowerPoint slide decks flung up behind slinky black turtleneck clad tech ‘rockstars’ - is just as daft as the tacit acceptance of still venerated ideas like magically self sustaining perpetual growth industries with no external costs, magically self regulating 'free' markets where we must ignore actual market makers algorithmically fighting for nanoseconds while unseen sovereign funds move with impunity and everybody knows that nobody fights the Fed, magically unbiased surveillance media that funds its investigative reporting by selling its readers' data to advertisers, livable (for the 0.1%) cities that magically assemble themselves based on the profit motives of developers, and, worst of all, systems of government that magically flow forth from self serving 'literal' interpretation of centuries old documents, to somehow meet the global existential challenges we must evolve to face as a united planet..

Modern globally leveraged consumerist capitalism, which turns renaissance mercantile thinking on its head to eclipse the imperialism sublimated in ‘diplomacy’ with a military industrial complex culmination of Laissez-faire economic thinking fueled by a never ending funny money spigot based on globally competing fiat Ponzi schemes backed by a nation’s consumerist proclivities cannot survive the lifting of the veils on any of these, its precious foundational myths.. It should surprise no one that the COPXX summits are hosted by a series of ever more autocratic and fossil fuel beholden petrodollar nations.. Just as the toilet bowl spiral of democratic nations ‘electing’ Boaty McBoatface level farcical leaders now that the billionaire class has figured out how much easier it is to subvert democracy than the old school efforts to overthrow it were cannot surprise anyone who bothers to look beyond the false choices of modern global finance driven politics.

These myths are all cloaking cybernetic systems. Cybernetics, which predates WWII, was, well before symbolic logic cast AI into its winter decades, the origin of neural / perceptron analysis and, while it has suffered greatly from its initial misuses, is, as originally conceived, at core a control theory for complex systems. Revisiting the interdisciplinary collaboration that was so misused before with current analysis methods has the potential to unify many techniques and systems analysis methods to represent a diverse range of real world dynamics of interactions between organizations along the lines of recent progress in digital twinning, while also providing a richer foundation to understand overarching integrations using deep learning and game theory. As opposed to disembodied context-free classical AI, now even such complex integrations can be modeled as functioning interconnected global systems, allowing academically rigorous attacks on the currently accepted externalities of corporate / cultural myths perpetuated as 'commonsense' by informal global systems of discreetly vested financial/political interests currently making child's play of subverting the vox populi..

Arbeit Arbiters: (AI work social designs to make you unfree)

In the industrial age America was nostalgic for farming, now it is nostalgic for manual labor.. The political fallout of the former is easily found in Gilded Age and Progressive Era political history, the latter, from the Cold War through the opening salvos of the Information Revolution, we all know first hand. Progressive Era reforms were nowhere near enough to combat the woeful state of education exposed in the First World War, and after a second one (and a depression) we were ripe for the first of the mass media propaganda wars which, in hindsight, would define our modern political society.. American education has progressed much since then, but, unlike those postwar years, we are now feeling the effects of the first wave of surveillance capitalist socio-behavioral automation on the American people - and seeing it in politics..

A similar wave of process automation in the white collar workforce that superseded the blue collar one as the dominant strata in society would be devastating, but, with generative AI, that is not going to be all that happens.. It may still be tempting to look at LLMs in their infancy (regarding business applications) and declare them to be glorified auto-complete apps, but we should bear in mind that the engineers involved in their earliest development who took the opposite extreme and declared them sentient were productive team members well versed in the underlying systems.. Of course, neither is true, but it is not a matter for simple interpolation either, and as these companies advance their models beyond typical internet users and then increasingly trained office workers, explaining away the alarm at the trendline only serves the techno oligarchs profiting from this..

As development of these technologies progresses at a pace that even insiders call alarming and - more importantly as the models trend towards real time mobile deployment (and they inevitably will), they will be integrated into ever more sophisticated AI toolchains allowing them to adapt to specialized domain language and ever broader ranges of business problems.. It is easy to say that LLMs are not AGI today - frankly, I think it is easy to say that they never will be, but we might think a bit about what exactly is meant by that "I" in AGI.. We have been the only intelligence that we know for our entire evolution - decomposing the components of our intelligence may be impossible, but let us consider the dominant productivity in office work, writing:

How much more capable will LLMs need to be before they are indistinguishable from typical workers - such as a typical remote worker? There were calls for regulation and, of course, some abortive political rumblings before the techno oligarchs engineered a behavioral Boaty McBoatface about face, showing that in the end, just like automation in factories, when the competition among those making multi-billion investments in this begins in earnest and the business case for LLMs in office automation becomes clear, profit will win out. From the perspective of intra system architecture, the issues that concern are the places where organizations will become rigid (and brittle) with fewer humans in the process, the effects of concentration of human interaction at the upper (remaining) positions, and most concerning (and for me most interesting) the changes in the culture (at some level of automation we may be able to say the personality) of these increasingly artificial organizations.. Truly a unique time to research future organizational information systems, but, of course, from a safe distance, which, crucially, means removing the entire matrix of social surveillance capitalist behavioral reality as it is being created for the amusement of the current techno oligarchic billionaire club..

This is obviously true of the VC/tech strains of corporate culture that this site so eloquently personifies, which is to say that, while the 'GAI is not AGI' red herring which I opened with has been beaten to surimi here on HN, the reality that GAI is on track to exceed the capital formation around search at the same development phase and, in addition to the hype cycle coverage we're all so familiar with, is doing so on anticipation of very different types of revenue from the slimy SEOs underlying search and the rest of the social surveillance capitalism infrastructure: namely the groups who are now quietly assessing the numbers of positions that are legally 'right sizable' and drawing up long term timelines to retire entire categories of employment as fast as the BPR teams reanimated by AI based complex analysis can produce plans, is interesting here on HN only for all the attendant uber-tech permutations / quickly pitchable VC opportunities.. I'll probably find a worthwhile fly fishing clientele before the 'this is fine' tech crowd burning down the edifices of civilization finally admits the long term societal implications of their new 'business reality'.

10.

Throughout history it has been convenient to blame others - or more precisely - to accept the propaganda that blames others. We simply never have a chance to look with historically and philosophically informed perspectives at the systems we are socialized by peer (and now socio- algorithmic) - and soon by generative behavioral - pressure into.. This persists even in our information age.. no matter how blindingly obvious (and pathetic) it becomes, today's populations - of all political stripes - fall for the same cheap ploys (even without the looming generative misinformation storms).. Let's be clear here: the problems are not in others - they are in the myopia of the middle classes: where all the manipulation of greed, the desire to breed, status, credulousness, etc have been distilled into an intoxicant that has dissolved rational thought and sublimated into the very fabric of society, such that we cannot even see the roaring irony in the expression of one's 'independence' through buying into the branding of corporations spending billions to fluff the egos of insecure credulous belongers or the utter futility of any attempt to transcend tribalism while swimming in a miasma of whataboutisms and fairytale fantasy lifestyles.. This has been well known to philosophers, painters and poets throughout history, but is now totally lost in our algorithmically, agentically polarising era on plutocrats, politicians and the parochial media addled proles they prey on.

With knowledge, which is ostensibly objective, and culture, which is inherently subjective but (should be) subject to objective critical thinking, we can map out the entire human world - even as large conceptual models, yet both our perception of fact and our understanding of the subjective values of culture are now greatly distorted, in accordance with their salience to polarising politics and algorithmic profits.. Media and market bubbles are old news but when the behavioralist hucksters have gotten to everyone else around you, then like Nancy calling out to Matthew in Body Snatchers, we must bear the massive impacts nonetheless.. \nBloated by social media's memethane bubbles, the corpulent corpus (corpse?) of the American body politic bears down and bulges out through every orifice and squelches every possibility not available to its flaccid intellect and flatulent oratory ; meanwhile market bubbles are blown by billionaire buyout babies who have clued in that their uncle Sam Fed is so afraid of their taper tantrums that he's turned the world's reserve currency into funny money in the No Lose Casino..

These have dire consequences for the formerly shared values of Americans, but even more so for the possibility of criticism of such 'culture'.. Blowhard bloviating is neither right nor wrong, it is just foul, and it is no surprise to see that under such political 'discourse' legislative functions cease.. It is also not surprising that the Fed has found itself holding the purse while our Idiocracy mudwrestles.. Now we are in a situation where the entire developed world is awash in decades of wave after wave of QE and the tide must go out, which is going to show just how many billionaire buyout geniuses and tech unicorns are actually just overhyped jackasses.

When our culture is so horribly skewed, independent knowledge becomes vital. Yet today the very technology that held the promise of instantaneous access to all knowledge of the entire world is now itself rapidly learning to mindlessly remix ever more convincing and arbitrarily bias-able versions of that knowledge with petabytes of prattle to suit any corporate or political campaign.. Here at Hacker News, many assert - without irony - that the best approach is to avoid anything to do with 'news', as if that would make the events and the technological manipulations of them somehow stop insinuating into every aspect of life..

Professional technologists who make voluntary, well remunerated, and socially subsidized career and family choices demanded by suburban middle class breeder farms inevitably make cultural choices that busy them with the consumer rituals of status stratification and distract with modern bread and circus entertainments, leaving far behind the actual intellectual pursuits in academia and their faded collegiate memories.. This is degrading to the collective knowledge of society and dangerous to the future of democracy. The eviscerated remnants of our fourth estate often (ironically enough) cover technology, and, exactly because the coverage is bad and getting worse, it is vital for us to discuss the way in which knowledge and culture are mediated by technology, which most assuredly, for any thinking technologist, must have at least a facet "that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity." Hacker News is growing up, just like the technologies it has spawned and, on the cusp of an age of generally convincing generative text, deep discussions on hacking the news are vital.. playing petty politics by abusing affordances meant for community content moderation is not only ironic, but pathetically passively political in the extreme.

Sprawl: (solipsistic suburban sanctimony at scale)

Beyond work, it's shameful to squander the time one could use for real life experience, cuisine and culture on vapid least common denominator mass market dark pattern crap: streaming surveillance services, manufactured marketing events, and retail ripoff destinations are not recreation - which is in nature, open to all, and why the National Parks are national treasures.. Frankly, the idea of spending any more time than absolutely necessary in environments designed to corral corporate workers or maximize retail consumption or increase land revenues from continually chewing up nature with residential sprawl is repugnant in the extreme - take responsibility for living and make it so that you live where you believe in the lifestyle instead of putting up with a life sold to you 50 weeks so you can blast out CO2 getting to other places sold to you in Instagram dreams that don't even exist and that you have zero chance to ever really known for a few days each (and then (maybe) in the (frail) remains of life).. (FWIW: my personal recreations: fly fishing (found / recycled materials fly tying) , (sea / whitewater) kayaking, coastal / bluewater sailing, ACSP course golf, NUE mountain biking, hiking, and camping) WHERE I LIVE AND KNOW WELL.

Similarly, great cuisine is not found in theatrical, artificed, extortionate 'dining experiences' or glossy ghost written cookbooks, nor in blind acceptance of the false economies of feed lot meat and hyper processed foods.. it is developed thru taking personal responsibility for the foods that sustain you: hunting for meat if that fits your ethics, fishing, foraging, and growing on the principles you have come to through thought and experience - and judging suppliers on that basis to develop your own personal place and practice for mastery of the techniques of cuisines and culture of cultures - that is the cultures inside wines, pickles, breads, beers, cheeses, charcuterie, and the techniques that defined the traditions of authentic culture, long before food science and branding campaigns' mass assaults on good taste.

Finally, in high culture, the nations of Japan and Taiwan, who saved Chinese culture from mainland Maoist mobs, still retain the 3500+ year old 漢字 core of their linguistic traditions, which are the progenitors of East Asia, and essential to the world's oldest continuous literary and calligraphic tradition. Never having been reduced to an alphabet, it missed the movable type press masses, but amassed millennia of semiotics culminating in 文人(Literati) Chinese / Japanese 狂草 writing, which, in the modern era of brutally conformist nonconformity masquerading as transcendence, stands among the few transcendently incisive, deeply emergent, subtle synergies of philosophy, poetry, and painting achieved by our species.

It is ironic that the internet age puts deep intellectual and cultural pursuits so easily in reach - yet somehow results in a high priesthood of the financiers' and techno oligarchs who are now grand inquisitors of consumer credit scoring and crass surveillance capitalist amusement addiction ruling our culture.. Is it this blindness that prevents us from seeing the authoritarian alternative tech universe that is assembling as a kind of negative reaction led by China? In the end, we have such inertia bound to our instincts and desires - and the cultures that have evolved to bind those to social order - and today's techno oligarchs know that even a token vote in a Stockholm syndrome regulatory captured klepto kakistoracy is enough that the “I got mine” SUV / Mcmansion voters would rather slowly simmer in than jump out.. This works just as well in the USA as in China..

This is why I reject the Pavlovian post-information hyper-consumerist surveillance app / streaming service / social media matrix and work to preserve the ideals of an open standards based, low bandwidth, max meritocratic / min monetization internet for academic collaboration, which is the origin - and real benefit of the internet for humanity.. As technologists in a community itself bound together by technology, we must do all that we can to address these issues, but, looking at the effects of the surveillance capitalist consumerist version of the information revolution so far, the rises in pseudo patriotic globocorp rhetoric covering supply side gouging, virulent partisans literally advocating violent coups in the halls of government, resurgent puritanical monotheists and cryptofascist nationalists fomenting civil war, unhinged pandemic paranoia, treasonous conspiracy theories, third world level gun violence, epidemic type 2 diabetes, homicidal SUV road deaths, etc, ad nauseum in our late stage surveillance capitalist / social media addled resurgent authoritarian Western societies (to say nothing of its affects’ effects on our collective personal values) now sadly argues for taking full advantage of commensurate rises in remote infrastructure for a digitally nomadic, max fuzz / min data exhaust career clear of Consumerican cancerous sprawl and perilously protofascist pseudo polarization pumped out to distract as the Buyosphere unrepentantly resurges to trash what remains of the biosphere.

12.

News, hacker or otherwise, is the transmission of knowledge. Of course, knowing presupposes a knower, and takes us directly into the now fraught semantics of 'knowing'.. Holding in abeyance for a moment the issues of who or what can be said to know, we should, in the aftermath of epoch making work in quantum entanglement, consider the epistemological limit of what can be known and how we approach knowledge in the broader sense.. Surely intransigent insisting on the usefulness of human 'common sense' in the face of irrefutable proof of its irrelevance to the very fabric of the reality we experience is no longer advisable.. I don’t mean to advocate some 'Fundamental Fysiks Group' type counter culture misappropriation of East Asian philosophy or to delve into so far unexplored (and possibly unexplorable) relationships (or not) between quantum entanglement and human consciousness, rather I mean to point out that we do not understand the fundamentals of the reality we exist in - nor the mechanisms by which we comprehend them.

Sadly, despite all the truly astounding triumphs of our science, as Chomsky, after reminding us (of what should be blindingly obvious) that language etched the grooves through which our thoughts must flow, is stuck, like the drunk looking for their keys under the lamp when it comes to basic ideas of knowing ourselves and our world. As Wittgenstein said "whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent".. This is because we are, by our very nature, limited, not by our senses, but by our minds and the perception of reality that we form as shared linguistic reality. This is the 'theory of mind' that we each must construct to operate in human society. Now, while this is even further afield than the above Fysiks / quantum mind flights of fancy, it is far more relevant to the news and our knowledge of it as we face up to increasingly unverifiable media - and the eerily anthropomorphizable sources generating it. Until we actually have some consensus on the philosophy (as contrasts with theory) of mind, we not only have no idea what AGI is (or even if we could recognize it) but we also are flying blind as we make a wizard's broom closet full of ever more clever stochastic parrots to start unfathomable generative feedback loops in the already virulent virtual societies that we have allowed to fester in social media..

To return to the question of who or what 'knows', philosophy of mind must be addressed at least insofar as we can speak of theory of mind beyond our own private notions of it.. This is to say that, in the four (somewhat busy) centuries of French history - the intellectual chasm - between Descartes' "I think therefore I am" and Sartre's "I am because I think, why do I think?" shows a gap in our understanding even greater than the Anglo-American postwar era gap between Turing's rather glib 'test' and Searle's Chinese room that has recently revisited us in the guise of a gaggle of chatbots.. Though, unlike this more modern one, the problem of the ghost in the machine is not so easily resolved, and so it seems to evoke from the (hard) scientific community more indifference than curiosity.

In the sciences, it is tempting to assume that everything important can be described in purely quantitative manner, and, to the extent that one only models determinate systems, this may be the case, but, both the social realities of scientific communities and the application of science in the realms of human society show that ideal to be of somewhat limited use.. Technology may originate in these idealized deterministic realms, but exists in human society; to understand the reality of technology, we must understand it in situ. When engineers working on chatbot algorithms in trillion dollar companies claim that they are sentient, we can say that there are significant problems with our understanding - not of technology but of what makes us human - namely the evolution of meaning in words like 'language', 'intelligence', 'cognition', 'sentience'..

Our spoken language likely predates the extant evidence of our earliest writing by at least 30x. It distinguishes our species' cognitive capacity, and, yes, also our sentience, from all others, including Neanderthals. LLMs are showing just how little we understand the import of our linguistic lineage as it manifests in loaded terms like 'intelligence' and 'sentience'. The peril of rushing headlong into dependence on these systems - and on the more sophisticated systems of autonomous agents we will surely develop - won't even be noticed after the 'ooh shiny' fades and the generative and cap ex free capabilities grow as office jobs slowly retire away until the hollowing out of our manufacturing sector looks like a hiccup a couple decades hence..

Epilogue: (a not so wafer thin mint for punishment gluttons)

Today technologies are illuminating the story of human society at the time of our earliest writing and even some of the artifacts of its antecedents where we formed early collective beliefs that now manifest in unpredictable ways like the instinctive reactions to chatGPT; it is going to be vital to understand the true nature of our uniquely human communication methods, since our cognitive - and social - equilibria depend on the affordances they provide.. manipulating this web of humanity with rapidly developing insentient systems will cut to the core of human communication, culture and society.

Extant written language opens with the equivalent of primitive spreadsheets. This may argue for equally practical origins millennia before of the agrarian societies where it developed, but recent archaeology shows the coercive semiotics of the ascent of animist high gods into systems of theistic rule.. Agrarians had less freedom and worse nutrition than egalitarian, widely travelling, artistically sophisticated hunter gatherers; evidence is mounting that they likely avoided them. Agriculture is a result of - not the origin of - this profound change in religion, which was our original (sin and) political rationale for agrarian conquest. We, like these ancestors, are supplicants to collectively imagined cult deities who sanctify expansionist rule and dependents in tribal nations that cannot exist without collectively feared outsiders. Via sublimated traces of these essential identity fictions in our languages, as in the cheering crowd (and, equally, the baying mob), we still secretly revel in this legacy. The descent from Berners-Lee's WWW to Musk's Twitter is not for lack of understanding of technology but of the nature of society - and of our algorithmic manipulations of its behavioral core.

In this information revolution, there is no value neutral path forward. Today, we in the developed world are, in the face of challenges that now can be seen to exceed those almost a century ago, locked in a struggle to once again build a better future - and tell a better story about it - than the authoritarian regimes that have coalesced around China - or the ones that coalesce around nationalists in Russia, religious extremists in Iran, Israel, etc.. or retrograde conmen hawking cheap "make $country great again" slogans around the G20 now.. These trends are not new, but the technologies enabling them are - as are the nuclear powers that form the global theater they are playing out in.. We must understand the subconscious forces that are now catalyzed by social technology as well as the dynamics of the multilateral threat matrix that our information systems play a vital role in - getting it wrong trends toward WWIII.

This is not only happening in the governance of society, but also in the two most problematic areas of the algorithmically enhanced version of the all too typical unconsidered life: faith and money, thus forming the triad of our species' behavioral weaknesses: power, credulity and greed. In the religions that have ruled the world since at least Pharonic Egypt, we have objectively risible but nonetheless behaviorally compelling beliefs which presaged our earliest shifts to agriculture and hierarchical society, and were codified, again and again down the millennia, until the reality that none of the menagerie of gods have any existence outside of collective human imagination was (and in dozens of nations today still is) punishable by death, resulting in a still ongoing struggle between two patently false yet highly evolved beliefs that, together with the parochial demi-religions of patriotism favored by scoundrels who happen to wrest control of one of the imaginary chunks humans carved the world into, serve as cover for plunder while the local strains of fundamentalist and patriot propaganda are conveniently beamed to their masses thru algorithmically boosted ubicomp social media ICT.

In the secular world, despite the fact that we now can realistically model all modern economic activities in detail - and despite the fact that these models disprove much economic theorizing that predates them, we have a similar situation that comes from our (mis)understanding of the industrial revolution, where two 'holy books', one by an 18th century Scotsman and another by a 19th century Prussian, now calcified under strata of neologistic propaganda to keep the poles that have formed in the last few global wars riled at each other and not at the billionaires and kleptocrats mushrooming in their own treasuries, underlie archaic economic pseudoscience about imaginary free markets and mythical labor / capital strife when the ONLY IMPERATIVE is removing the acquisitive addictions inculcated by media funded exclusively by overproduction profiteers from the cybernetics of improving our global human ecosystem that deeply distort both labor and capital - carrying science and technology along like deer in the headlights of easy grant funding sources for consumerist and militarist rides - before we degrade our environment so much that tribal existential contention latent in our prehistory returns us to darkness..

~~~

"Beware the barrenness of a busy life"

--Socrates

“I’ve been trying a long time to be of no use, and though I almost died, I’ve finally got it. This is of great use to me. If I had been of some use, would I ever have grown this large? Moreover, you and I are both of us things. What’s the point of this—things condemning things? You, a worthless man about to die—how do you know I’m a worthless tree?”

--Chuang Tzu

"The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane."

--Marcus Aurelius

~~~

"Leisure is the mother of Philosophy"

--Thomas Hobbes

"It is too difficult to think nobly when one thinks only of earning a living."

--Jean-Jacques Rousseau

"Today as always, men fall into two groups: slaves and free men. Whoever does not have two-thirds of his day for himself, is a slave, whatever he may be: a statesman, a businessman, an official, or a scholar."

--Friedrich Nietzsche

~~~

"Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves."\n..\n"Men have become the tools of their tools."

--Henry David Thoreau

"I'm losing the precious days. I am degenerating into a machine for making money. I am learning nothing in this trivial world of men. I must break away and get out into the mountains to learn the news."

--John Muir

"There are worlds of experience beyond the world of the aggressive man, beyond history, and beyond science. The moods and qualities of nature and the revelations of great art are equally difficult to define; we can grasp them only in the depths of our perceptive spirit."

--Ansel Adams

~~~

"Capitalism creates a huge community of producers who are unceasingly striving to deprive each other of the fruits of their collective labor, and an oligarchy that cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organized society....the subjugation is not by force but because the privileged class has long ago established a system of values by which the people were thenceforth, to a large extent unconsciously, guided in their social behavior."

--Albert Einstein

"There are no secrets about the world of nature. There are secrets about the thoughts and intentions of men."

--J. Robert Oppenheimer

“What is it that we human beings ultimately depend on? We depend on our words. We are suspended in language. Our task is to communicate experience and ideas to others.”

--Niels Bohr

~~~

Many linguists hold that since spoken language has a much longer lineage than writing it is much more important as a focus of study, which, from the perspective of linguistics as academics have defined it may be true, but, if anything, a dearth of understanding of the underlying unique qualities of writing within human cognition, communication and creativity seems to only exacerbate the Wild West feel of LLMs and computational linguistics in that it is a purely procedural endeavor, with little perspective on the language that it ingests.. An ironic and lamentable situation, given the lineage of our written civilization, and one in which the intrinsic - and idiosyncratic - relations between writing, technology and cultural interactions are completely lost..

Most of us write for a living, in one form or another, yet few of us actually pick up a pen to do anything other than sign our name, which is done with a seal stamp in Japan, a place that I was fortunate to spend some very formative time in and which is of course one of the most technological nations.. As technologically advanced as Japan is, technology that seems archaic to western eyes such as the fax machine persists.. As strange as it may seem, it does so primarily because of the importance of handwriting in Japanese culture.. According to the particular foreigners' perspectives this is backward or secure or whatnot, but digital everything, including secure digital seal stamps are in wide use in post pandemic Japan.. The fax persists only because of the culture of calligraphy and its deep inprint on (and comparative elevation of) Japanese high culture..

Unlike the West, calligraphy lives on as high art, not only in my beloved Kyoto but also Tokyo, Taipei,.. Despite the supreme adaptation to today's subtly pseudoquantitative technoOligarchic world commerce¹ that the history of America (and England before it) has conferred to the common language that separates them (less and less after Brexit it must be said), it is a rather poor language for literature of the sort French and Japanese are capable of.. Although English is hardwired into my consciousness and Chinese is making a necessary if unwelcome debut there, my formative years were in Kyoto and in Japanese, something I am forever grateful for as I pick up a brush or (in spite of my advancing years) a bit more français..

--calligraphic consultant curmudgeon

Cultures, like climate, change only slowly and imperceptibly until complex combinations of parameters push them over tipping points.. We know the great tipping points recorded in history (such as it is) but the interstitial mundane world can tell us much about the trajectory we are on, if we can step out of our parochial frames and look comparatively in computational models at culture through the long arcs of history and even archaeology.. Doing so renders clear the gaping maw between the amount of change in our output of greenhouse gasses required and the amount of change to our industrial output that the political and business regimes we have been existing under could survive without collapse.

Essentially we are all on a ship (of fools it increasingly seems) that is headed into the rocks but is so vast that its inertia cannot be steered in any meaningful way without ripping the hull apart.. For all the discussion about how far off the rocks are, there is comparatively little about how this social superstructure might be addressed to facilitate a meaningful collective course change.. To my mind these sociotechnical superstructures in our ubiquitous globally internetworked world are best understood not by political / organizational science or economics but, rather by studying the systems that are used to implement policy, conduct business, collaborate, associate and maintain control, first stripping them of their bogus claims to represent some optimization of human good, which only betrays a profound ignorance of what is actually good²

These systems are rapidly evolving to use machine learning and LLMs in ways that will cause profound changes which are so far completely unknown, except inasmuch as we can observe the drastic effects of similar changes in public social networks.. As with the complex collaborative systems of analysis that are being used to quantify and address climate change, we are now rapidly approaching systems of falsifiable scientific theories derived from big data describing human activities and analyzed using proven techniques of computational mathematics.. The issues in conducting research in large political and business organizations are exactly what keep me motivated and are, quite frankly, the only reason I stay involved in technology, despite the tiresome sexist, ageist and otherwise narrowly technical attitudes (as I briefly touched on above ;)

--epistemologically enquiring eremite

Despite deep analysis during work, there is a shocking superficiality to many of our lives: 'Professionals' try to separate out 'hobby' and 'career' in life as if there is some secret 'happy cog' balance, when the only real ideal is to align intellect and passion independent of insensate and malign external pressures.. For example, the beautiful impracticality³ of fly fishing is perfected in the intricate subsurface ecology of its intrinsic riparian and littoral bounds, yet sadly, in our visual age, a superficial fascination with facile fish feeding frenzies that "match the hatch" of the eponymous surface flies' death throe orgies dominates the media, to the detriment of the angling that lies beneath..

The more cerebral fly fishing is down in the riffles and swirls amongst the rocks, mud and snags, where still largely unknown nymphs that become those briefly spectacular flies live for years or even decades.. Unlike ballasted and belled bait flinging or shiny fish shaped plastic phalli spin casting methods, the entomologic craft of nymph tying and the sublime submarine art of nymphing are intellectually incisive on our instinctual pursuit of that which surely sees us and swims in shadows, safely subliminal in our world..

This shadowy piscine perspective is now obversely exegetic to surreptitious etymologic patterns in emergent spidery threads monitoring and animating generative behavioral barbs that silo global cognitive flows to totalitaristate / trillionaire technocerebral terraforming in the shady social surveillance milieu just beneath the surface of ubiquitous screens aspiring to neuroprosthesis and filtering humanity's few remaining independent thoughts for power and profit.. A perspective that is irrelevant by design in the cloudy C-suite concepts, expanding externality entropy, multiplying meaningless meetings, etc hiding extractive social mining industries now underlying most modern tech 'professions'. The 'sacrifice' of prioritizing life to learn deeply from well chosen and deeply lived 'hobbies' and accept the venal 'professional' world only on the terms learned there is soul salvation, worth a king's -even a tech billionaire's- ransom.

--recalcitrant riverine recluse

¹Once one becomes comfortable as an outsider to this behavioralism bestiary of stimuli, it clears one's thinking about remunerative as well as recreative aspects of what is good in life.. .. in the corporate world, a contract and the ability to write politely without any feelings whatsoever to whiny policy pedants and impotent wannabe techno bullies alike (and similarly amongst assorted phenotypic manifestations of all corporate cultures, from startups thru transnationals, (which personally provide as rich an academic field of study as actual (and actually beneficial) compost heaps might provide entomologists)) suffice socially to move effectively (toward actual contractual goals), however as a sometime fly fishing guide, it does not take long to realize that these same types manifest similar behaviors in their personal lives and thus are the clients who spend the most and, inevitably, cannot resist "achieving something", desperate to perform and "not waste time", resulting in tiresomely repetitive type A conformist competitiveness..

Therefore it is clear that our strain of the world’s most well remunerated one percent literally "in the wild" are essentially an impromptu ethnographic criminology study among the subset of deviants who self select by gaming their systems best - something the technological propagation of these values has now writ large across the developed world - and, looking at the changes I would have to make to comport my guide services to become a 'successful business', I am constantly reminded just how much of the real beauty of life is rendered inaccessible by the 'business mindset' in the professional realm, just as these ‘professionals’ dedicated themselves to ensuring through ever more insidiously ubiquitous behavioral dark patterns in every aspect of the public sphere they have access to.. In life, independently verifiable data are vital but ultimately only make one a marginally more useful cog, absent a deep, independently constructed worldview that stands up to scrutiny..

This goes to the heart of our understanding of ourselves as conscious entities - an understanding that historically originates in religious beliefs, which necessarily colors the resultant worldview.. although I've long given up on the loaded terms that so often animate the lives of those who are all around me like ‘god and country’, I cannot unsee their foundational role in the built, printed, broadcast, and social infrastructures, hence the value of ‘semiotic demediation’ via handmade paper, brushes, and ink sticks of Chinese/Japanese traditions; uniquely among great cultures, absent such unfortunate distal object internalizing dualist origins.

~~~

²Now, as optimizations pile on optimizations, from linear to nonlinear to stochastic gradient descent, we have become afraid of anything else - and relieved to forget that the greatest of our philosophers, from Socrates and Chuang Tzu to Hobbes, Rousseau and even Einstein have recognized the fallacy of blind parametric optimization in social values and the importance of leisure to intellectual progress.. In our modern technology obsessed world, leisure is seen only as heavily marketed treats, no different than junk food, with predictable and obvious results.. Leisure - and the uses one put it to - were, at least among the Literati of ancient China and Japan and the humanist philosophers of Renaissance Europe, the mark of one's character in ways bogus behavioralist benefits or silly social credits cannot even begin to approach..

Just as modern mass/social media have done in the rest of society, in sport, the 'business realities' these ridiculous artificial constructs engender result in perversion of what should be deeply personal meditation on our relationship nature, as, to take a personal example of fly fishing and fly tying, with marine ecology and ancestral thread handicraft, becomes instead an advertising slathered frenetic powerboat spectacle full of false drama and devoid of any appreciation of the nature being exploited.. Sickeningly, this is actually a step up from the propagandist, populist sexing up of deeply damaging deep sea extractive fishing practices.. Fly fishing may be elitist, and my take on it extreme, but among the assaults on our ecosystem, globalizing ad driven middle class overconsumption is surely closing in the fastest, and if extoling ecologically sound examples of entertainment to counter (data)-extractive industry sponsored mass market vulgarity is elitist then we are all well and truly doomed.

I am truly grateful for the lack of such 'business' and the lack of corporate tribe type A deviants in the most technologically inaccessible parts of fly fishing, which, for those who never lost their childhood fascination with peering under rocks and, rather than abandoning it, delved deeper into tying their own subsurface 'flies' and strive to fish from the most difficult shores, is an elegant and apt motivational model for life in a corporate society and as sure a measure of character as anything in life can be.. ..and, no, the people who we hold up as paragons of nature and all things outdoors would not recognize today's coddled consumerist 'outdoorsmen' as anything other than the threats to the future of the outdoors that they are.

~~~

³Fly fishing (Tenkara in the Japanese mountains) and other pursuits such as calligraphy in the East and philosophy in the West were at the center of life for those who were able to pursue them.. Elitist, but also core to the philosophy that we still rely on for our laws, culture and shared values today.. The implicit 'philosophy' of unending optimization underpinning mechanization, automation and generative 'intelligence' may find maxima and minima, but I expect none of these will be of much use as we flail about in a vain attempt to find some common value to unite us, beyond maximizing profit and minimizing humanity in the corporate systems we are now replacing the public infrastructure our collective heath, education and governance rely on with.

While I would never say "take my word for it", (or even 12k of them ;) I would humbly suggest that for very much of what is really good in life, data driven optimization approaches are drastically misguided (for those of us uninterested in maximal consumerism at least) - to return to fishing, one hopes that the maximalism will end with commercial fishing fetishist TV programs, frenetic fish plucking catch and release competitions and the like - and not with AI drone assist drift netting or fiber optic long line HD fishing TV, which, judging by the absolute cratering of the market for so called 'bridge cameras' on the other end of the HD screen, is exactly the trend in all pursuits including photography, where admirably backpackable birding cameras inevitably give way to pixel peeping and long lens envy, and the fait accompli of folding chairs, coolers and insulated birding blinds filling up a Viagra truck..

These and all the rest of the market driven approaches to finding ‘the good life’ inevitably slither under all that is truly good in life - straight down the drain of market scale into the sewers of least common denominator cesspools.. this predictably pulls people away from the long hikes, waist deep bouldering and crouching, cast-from-cover strictly silent non line-of-sight fishing that I offer and towards a high tech array of toys rivaling a commercial trawler with easy click-and-cast options on a blingy, loud and fast bass boat platform, with, of course, the same blingy loudness in a truck to pull it (the truck seeing far more action in the Great American Pastime of aggressive, desperately performative "everybody look at my loudness" gashole driving theater aurally raping what little remains of our natural solitude and keeping us among the world's worst in extravehicular wildlife and human maimings and deaths).. ..thus do wee bit wranglers in their quotidian cubicles continue with the vile work of the buffalo runners of the previous Robber Barron era's Manifest Destiny, now not of a nation, but of a techno oligarchy, increasingly indistinguishable from the totalitarian states they enable.","created_time":1642824862,"created":"4 years ago","id":"rntn","karma":62947}