The Danger of Black-Box Abstraction

When I was a graduate student, if you were going to convert some data or something like that, you would write the FORTRAN code to convert the data yourself. That’s how you would do it. Now there are these programs. There are these windows and you click. I .nd with my students all the time, they don’t know why something isn’t working. I’m like, well, did the data convert properly? Open the .le and look at it. It is so black box and it is going from the time when you knew how the data w...

 Media Algorithms Keep You in a Bubble

Engagement algorithms are simple. If you, the user, have engaged with a certain topic in the past, you are likely to engage in the future. So when a new piece of content is created on the platform that belongs to that topic, why not show it to you? You might even give it a thumbs up (or like, or heart). This selection for engagement places you, the user, in an engagement maxima. You are maximally engaged given the topics you have expressed interest in in the past. But what happens after a f...

 Recursive Cybernetic Design

In 1962, a few years before Alan Kay started his career, Engelbart set the program for his own U.S. Air Force–funded research group at the Stanford Research Institute (Bardini 2000:1-32), aiming for nothing less than to re-engineer the “HLAM-T,” the “Human using Language, Artifacts, Methodology, in which he is Trained” (Engelbart 1962:9). This HLAM-T was always a cyborg, and as such it can be engaged in a continuous process of “augmenting human intellect.” According to Engelbart...

 How Brains Respond to Positive/Negative Feedback in Child...

In children up to eight or nine years old, the dopamine-modulating reward center in the nucleus accumbens reacts strongly to positive feedback (activating the prefrontal cortex) and minimally to negative feedback. In older children, increased activation still occurs in the PFC when dopamine is released in response to positive feedback (particularly in response to correct answers/ predictions). However, the greatest age-related change is the higher reactivity of the NAc to negative feedback an...

 Factions in the Artilect War

I predict that humanity will split into three major philosophical, ideological, political groups, which I label as follows. –The Cosmists (based on the word “cosmos”) will be in favor of building these godlike machines (the artilects), who would be immortal, think a million times faster than humans, have unlimited memory, go anywhere, do anything and take any shape. The Cosmists would take a quasi-religious view that they are god builders. Privately, I am a Cosmist, but publicly, I hav...

 Cybernetics as a Trait of Living Organisms

One of the most characteristic properties of all living organisims, from the smallest to the largest, is their capacity to develop, operate, and maintain systems which set a goal and then strive to achieve it through the cybernetic process of trial and error. The discovery of such a system, operating on a global scale and having as its goal the establishment and maintenance of optimum physical and chemical conditions of life, would surely provide us with convincing evidence of Gaia's existenc...

 Cybernetics Extending Human Perception

And man's relationship to his environment has changed. As a result of cybernetic efficiency, he finds himself becoming more and more predominantly a Controller and less and Effecter. The machine, largely self-regulating and highly adaptive, stands between man and his world. It extends his perception in furthest space and deep into the finest particles of matter; physical labour is replaced by accurate, tireless automata; in many situations teh machine can gather required information, store, p...