Showing posts with label civilization. Show all posts
Showing posts with label civilization. Show all posts

Wednesday, March 27, 2013

Writing, Ideology & Mass Communication In Techno-Industrial Society

Originality, accuracy, and clarity can be hard things to measure in terms of the written word. Originality is always bound to some degree with the familiar. Accuracy, while sometimes easier to assess, is rarely complete and can still lead us to faulty conclusions. Clarity is largely dependent upon the ability of any readers to comprehend, relate to, and think reasonably about whatever is being presented to them. These three aspects comprise but a general shortlist of problems a writer may face when trying to compose something of worth and interest to the broader reading public.

Underlying political and ideological tendencies, which are engrained in the general public, further serve to restrict a writers ability to find and captivate an audience. The promotion of certain ideas, right or wrong, can even be dangerous to writers who promote them. People have been burnt at the stake and put before firing squads because of their ideas.

More commonly problematic is simply the inability of writers to adequately reach a receptive audience. On the simplest level this could sometimes be due to a writers limited access to a suitable medium. However, even having access to modern tools of mass communication does not guarantee that the message being produced will reach a broad or receptive audience. The reasons for this are many.

Wednesday, August 22, 2012

The System Currently In Place

The CEO of a prominent group promoting the manifestation of a technological singularity, Luke Muehlhauser from the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, recently came out with a very surprising statement regarding the dangers which would accompany the creation of artificial super-intelligence:

“Unfortunately, the singularity may not be what you're hoping for. By default the singularity (intelligence explosion) will go very badly for humans, because what humans want is a very, very specific set of things in the vast space of possible motivations, and it's very hard to translate what we want into sufficiently precise math, so by default superhuman AIs will end up optimizing the world around us for something other than what we want, and using up all our resources to do so.”

For those of you unfamiliar with the concept of the technological singularity... it has to do (generally speaking) with programming a thinking computer that initially has the same cognitive abilities as a human being. Due to computers regularly becoming able to process evermore information faster, in a very short time, after a computer achieved a human level of intellect, it would, conceivably, surpass that level – arguably in the next moment and almost certainly within the next few years. What would start with a computer being able to pass a Turing test (basically being able to fool human observers as to whether or not they were having a dialogue with a human or a computer) would then shortly be followed by a type of self-consciousness machine that would intellectually be capable of manipulating humans and taking human rationality to its furthest degree.

Thursday, September 01, 2011

Dispatches from the Apocalypse

An excellent, moving article from the Utne Reader written by Junot Díaz, from Boston Review

"Isn’t that after all the logical conclusion of what we are wreaking? The transformation of our planet into a Haiti? Haiti, you see, is not only the most visible victim of our civilization—Haiti is also a sign of what is to come."

Saturday, May 21, 2011

Some quick notes...

A lot of nothing has been happening lately in my personal life and... I must admit that I'm simply not very inspired to write or do much. I've had some ideas for articles and some other projects... but a lot of them seem a bit hackneyed -- and I'm not sure when I'll get around to putting out some more original content again. Basically, for what it's worth, I'm in a rut. And I find it difficult to continuously analyze the news or participate in any half-assed social movements. So... I'll probably continue taking a break from the world of analysis -- it hasn't seemed to do anyone much good anyway.

I did want to write this bit here today simply to... get some things off my chest. First of all... I stand by my last article -- I think the aftermath of the Japanese Tsunami will have very harsh economic repercussions for the the rest of the world (in addition to the immediate wake of the disaster in Japan itself). But I want to make it clear that this disaster was merely something that added strain to a system that was already disastrously collapsing. The dominant economic system, and all that it implies, is fundamentally unstable. Myself and others have tried to show the facts behind this again and again -- so I won't get into that.

Secondly... today I saw more recent video examples of police brutality -- a man being dragged from a wheelchair who was in no position to harm the police, and a woman who was basically an innocent bystander who had her teeth knocked out (the police report said she stumbled). I see a lot of such videos on a daily basis and I really just can't comprehend how this is tolerated in any society -- especially one that is supposed to value freedom. All sorts of people from every element of society get caught up and brutalized by this violent system of police repression and I just can't understand how it is allowed to persist. It's a sad disgusting phenomena and it's one of those things that makes me persistently cynical about any hopes for modern society.

Anyway... that's about all. Maybe I'll write something else in a week or a month or a year. Just wanted to get this out there and let people know where I'm at with this blog and everything else.

Cheers.

Sunday, October 31, 2010

A small part of what it is that inspires my political/philosophical worldview...

(The following statements [backed up with linked citations], were given as response to a comment on Reddit which reached the front page of the "best of" subreddit. Since I took the time to spell it out and dig up the links... I thought I'd repost it here as a reminder to my readers of some of the things which I feel are fairly important. Most of these issues won't come as a surprise to anyone, but it's amazing how easy it is to forget about them as we go about our mundane daily lives.)

Sunday, July 04, 2010

Two Video Interviews with Two Great Philosophers

I know it may seem like I'm posting a lot of videos lately, and this format may be a bit clumsy (you can just watch them on Youtube if you want), but these are really excellent multi-part videos featuring two of my favorite philosophers (Jacques Ellul and Herbert Marcuse) discussing imminently important subjects which are often misunderstood.

We'll start with Ellul and you can click the little "read more..." button below (if necessary) to see the rest. BTW, the first interview is given in French (w/ English subtitles) and the second, with Marcuse, is given in English.

Friday, June 18, 2010

Anarchy, Technophiles, Freedom & Primitivism

(The following piece was written to create a dialogue in response to an article entitled: "Anarchy Would Most Likely Prevent The BP Oil Disaster" written by someone known as ComradShaw.)

The ideas presented in ComradShaw's article are somewhat ideal, but they seem to rely too heavily on a misguided notion of self-restraint -- when such a thing seems to be seriously lacking in actual reality. The author seems to think that everyone could vote and agree on everything -- which, while potentially nice in practice, may or may not actually be somewhat more ideal in the consequences. My point isn't that people shouldn't rely on self-restraint in many matters, nor am I suggesting that they shouldn't have a much greater say about what goes on in their world. But even free people in a far more egalitarian society could make horrible mistakes. And hubris, whether coming from the whole or from even just a segment of society, can lead to disaster.