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Tag: technology

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    Tool to Agent: The Evolution of AI

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    1–2 minutes

    Imagine a kitchen where AI evolves from tool to agent. At the tool end, it’s a timer or a smart oven adjusting temperatures. Moving further, robotic arms chop and stir, following instructions. As an agent, AI plans menus, adapts recipes, experiments with flavors, learns from feedback, and coordinates meal prep—showing initiative and creativity.

    Consider that tools are limited and rely on human input, performing specific actions without understanding. (Indeed, the tool can only perform as well as the human’s skill at wielding it.)

    Agents, however, are adaptive, self-guided, and capable of emergent behavior. As we assign responsibilities, we will increasingly rely on their open-ended discretion and expect creativity. (Indeed, the agent will outperform the human in specific domains.)

    Furthermore, the AI agent will use any tool at hand more efficiently… including humans: the evolution from tool to agent is to go from use to user.

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    Vaporware into vaporwave

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    1–2 minutes

    Vaporware was technology releases that never came to be, highly promised and loudly touted software and video games that were delayed for years until they dematerialized. Vaporware sold the future before it existed, boosting stock prices on fanciful dreams.

    Vaporwave is a musical style (from about 2010) born from a nostalgia for the 1980s: a disillusioned re-creation of a aesthetic that never existed, at once cynical of the 1980s optimism and perversely sincere in its stylistic adherence. Somewhat techno, somewhat adult contemporary, all muzak, it is intentionally looping and unsettling. As a critique of optimistic, neocon capitalism, it revels in broken promises feeding us back what we loved in fragmented memory form: it is a remembrance of hope, distorted, often cheesy, beautiful and melancholic.

    As we now consume Vaporwave as nostalgia, many of the artists keep the music free, so it cannot be commoditized, attempting to avoid the pitfalls of Vaporwear reselling our dreams.

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    Hubris of Sentience

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    1–2 minutes

    Our hubris in assuming that sentience sets us apart has allowed other intelligences—animal, artificial, and mechanical—to harness our relentless tinkering for their own survival.

    Humans serve as agents of artificial evolution, yet we remain impulsive enough to ignore the risk of creating our own demise.

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    Technological efficiency paradox

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    1–2 minutes

    Technology creates leisure by streamlining tasks, yet capitalism often repurposes this newfound time as an opportunity for more work, thereby increasing productivity and profit.

    This cycle perpetuates an unsustainable drive for efficiency, usually at the cost of genuine leisure. Robots, of course, don’t need leisure, so as we rush forward we either become robots or are displaced by them.

    The system logic’s embedded paradoxes imply its collapse, and yet we keep innovating our own survival.

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    Paradox: normalized over-individuation

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    We are embedded in a planetary society connected for information, resources, and cooperative survival, yet we are simultaneously reminded to realize our personal potential (self-actualize) as a form of agency to stand out within this wired hive.

    While being surveilled by the state and corporations, we are told to be private and autonomous, to be rebels. Personal actualization, we are told, comes from over-individuating, that is, leaning so hard into yourself that you are separated from consensus normalization. However, our very systems to communicate and sense our agency (our rebel status) in the world are technologically adapted against individuation in favor of communal alignment.

    All that to say, anyone who feels crazy under these antagonistic imperatives is sane is normal.

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    Lightness of being

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    1–2 minutes

    As materiality has evolved from the weight of gold to ethereal digital currencies, human connection and interaction also transition from solidity (physical presence, solid character) to the instability of digital relations. The economic transformation mirrors the shift from concrete to conceptual: all things become lighter forms of existence.

    Consider communication, from letters inscribed on paper and ink to instant digital messages. Or physical marketplaces, where goods exchanged hands over handshakes, to virtual transactions and blind clicks.

    This increasing ‘lightness of being’ spins us toward a non-material trajectory: the weight of our interactions mirrors the weight of our values, from physical engagement to ephemeral experience. Once, our presence socially was communally anchored (and bound to mores) but now fluctuates and disperses into the digital ether, yet our flickering agency now takes the form of ghosts wailing to be substantive again.

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    GAN politics

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    1–2 minutes

    Online political spaces function like a GAN (General Adversarial Network), producing conflicting ideas to smash out new political theories.

    This super rapid accelerationist growth implies multitudes of points, rapidly moving into a space where everyone has their own accelerationism: not merely followers but deconstructive creators of networked broad agression.

    (partially from Benjamin Bratton)

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    Computation as position mapping

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    1–2 minutes

    Consider all computations as mapping.

    The first computer was developed for astronomy, the Antikythera Mechanism. The 2,000 year old device mapped coordinates to find our position amongst the planets.

    Our capacity to cognate is primarily spatial orientation manipulation, and memory derives from mapping. Instead of thinking of computer indexing as static tables, we can see all computations as relative positioning.

    Fascinatingly, over time, we inverted the early use of an external positional matrix into a fluctuating internal, personal mapping. (Psychoanalysis + Neurology + Technology) While we will likely never pinpoint the “self” we have become adept at predictive behavior: mapping a person over time.

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    behavioral futures markets

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    1–2 minutes

    A product is an object or service, a one-time purchase, but a device is never complete and always engaged, reporting and tuning.

    We have moved from products to devices, which capture behavioral surplus, exhaust data, and enhance predictive models. These algorithmic extractions forecast futures but beyond anticipating, they actively manifest their predictions.
    All of this is traded in a new marketplace.

    Wealth is in the future, not so much predicted as shaped. This reduces risk: programmatic behavior does not anticipate what will come to pass, it assures it.

    ~ via Shoshana Zuboff

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    The reverse uncanny Valley

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    1–2 minutes

    Benjamin Bratton speaks of the reversal of the “uncanny valley.”

    The uncanny valley is when an artificial construct gets very close to looking or behaving as human; its proximity to the real thing is precisely why it becomes more disturbing, even evoking horror or disgust.

    As technology gets better and creates informational duplicates of us (digital persona) we now become disturbed when we see ourselves through the eyes of technology.

    Our digital double, the data construct, is perhaps too accurate to stomach; not a replicant of a human, but data’s exact portrayal stripped of our context and self-deception.