Testing my thesis statement (in the recent Project Snapshot), Paul Diduch pointed out to me that significant impacts are usually not hard to discern. That’s true, but there are exceptions. I believe orgregores are one of them. Here is first cut justification of my claim.
My "Not" Rule (if a senior executive claims something, one gets closer to the truth by taking the negative) is doing well in the current UK government meltdown.
On Thursday October 13, the Chancellor of the Exchequer Kwasi Kwarteng said in Washington, DC, "I'm not going anywhere" (BBC). He resigned the next day after a hurried return from the US (Reuters).
In Parliament on Wednesday October 19, Prime Minister Liz Truss insisted that “I am fighter and not a quitter” (CNBC, PM questions video). She resigned on Thursday October 20 (CNBC).
There are many ways to define agency. The ones I’ve seen provide criteria for deciding whether an entity is or is not an agent. However, once it’s established that something is an agent it would be useful to assess degrees of agenthood.
I’m enjoying Justin Gregg’s new book, If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal: What Animal Intelligence Reveals About Human Stupidity. In the fourth chapter he discusses some problems with human morality. It made me realize that we need to be just as skeptical that ethics is an unalloyed good as we are that technological progress will always have beneficial outcomes.
The emotional invisibility of Big Tech mystifies me. Why don’t I get more worked up about it? I can only speak for myself since I don’t have any survey data, but I suspect it’s not just me.
I've been under the weather since last week, and Nancy Lucero—not just my tai chi teacher but also a talented designer—suggested a cleansing shower with all that nice, warm steam. I remarked that hot showers are one of the best things in life, along with sleep and chocolate. She responded with this:
Is 100 MHz of radio spectrum a lot? It depends on whether it’s at 200 MHz (say, 200-300 MHz) where it’s a significant chunk of the entire band, or at 20 GHz (say, 20.0-20.2 GHz) where it’s just a sliver. Musicians don’t encounter this puzzle because they express intervals in terms of frequency ratios. Thus, a soprano can sing the same song as a bass, though at a much higher pitch; the same notes but transposed upwards.
When we think about spectrum allocations, we shouldn’t think about raw hertz, but rather about the “song” that a given number of hertz allows an operator “to sing.” (H/t Nathan Simington, Ofcom/William Webb, and SPT; see endnote [1].)
We’re surprised when something unexpected happens; by definition, it’s something we hadn’t been thinking about. One way to avoid surprise is to try imagining unthought things. One way to do that is to consider how institutions stop us thinking about certain things. I’ll focus this post on spectrum topics we may not be thinking about hard enough. They include non-local interference, 3D interactions, agencies outside the FCC, the dearth of spectrum zoning, and the end of endlessly increasing demand for spectrum.
Applying Betteridge's law of headlines to this blog’s title, it’s a fair bet that egregores (distinct non-physical entities that arise from a groups of people with shared motivations) do not play. And yet…
I’ve been impressed by the creativity of my dreams – they show imagination and invention that my waking life doesn’t have. They’ve become tiresome, though, because I can’t get sense from them, try as I might. I’m beginning to think that there is no meaning to be found because there is no dream-self; it's just a mindless algorithm churning out material.
Slime molds are amazing, particularly when these single-celled organisms congregate and start moving as a single body. The analogy with groups of humans is tempting. I suspect that human organizations are distinct entities separate from their constituent people just as a fruiting slime mold is more than its constituent cells.
I was recently reminded of the old Scottish grace, “Some hae meat that canna eat, And some wad eat that want it; But we hae meat, and we can eat, And sae the Lord be thankit.” Expressing thanks for one’s blessings is a wonderful practice – but what if there’s no one to be thanked?
Ken Liu’s 2012 short story “The Perfect Match” is a disturbing premonition of a world where Facebook is everyone’s personal assistant. What struck me most forcefully, though, was that although a Turing-test-capable personal AI is a key character, and feeding the algorithm drives the plot, the story is told in entirely human terms. There’s no sense, let alone a depiction, of the super-human technology that I imagine is driving everything. (Spoilers.)
