Spring break was a good week for reading, so today I have for you a daisy-chain of quotes and musings.
Any response appreciated, however tl;dr or part-baked; even especially such convenient quick connections.
Many experimental cognitive media are intended as explanations [...] By contrast, the prototype medium we'll develop is intended as part of an open-ended environment for exploration and discovery. Of course, exploration and discovery is a very different process to explanation, and so requires a different kind of medium. [http://cognitivemedium.com/emm/emm.html]
Perhaps once, perhaps no longer: the abstraction barriers between explaining (and finding things to explain) -to-oneself and -to-others seem to be leaking.
Or so at least it seems from the Orlando airport, where rain is pouring through the gap between two glass doors, a gap no doubt left unfilled for the sake of transparency.
Anybody who is not a white man (or at least interacts with people who are not white men) who has used Twitter for any significant amount of time could have predicted this outcome. The fact that they did not include safeguards against the bot learning the worst of humans to begin with is completely beyond me. They’ve already shown that their algorithm does a great job at online learning of a conversational model — it only took a few hours for Tay to begin spewing hate speech. [https://medium.com/@thricedotted/the-ongoing-lessons-of-tay-a585ff25aa1c]
Tay is the latest in a new style of industrial sociological/algorithmic engineering research where systems are tossed into our shared awareness to see if they float.
Researchers hope that explorations these systems do will serve as explanations of the systems or of humans; companies hope for good PR; but the humans played darkly with Tay, embedding hate.
consider... design as a form of participation in complex adaptive systems [http://jods.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/design-as-participation]
If exploration/explanation are two sides of a mobius strip, so too are design and desire. In watching it's impossible to escape the realization that design is the process of figuring out what we want by making what we thought we wanted. Or not a cycle, but two parallel tracks: we start with an image of what we want, an image of what we'll make; they entwine and ramify.
Any actual existent object or experience seems increasingly a fleeting wave-crest, a particle captivating for its momentary capture of a world of streams.
(Of course I would feel this way after a week of slow days sunsets and museums.)
But at my back from time to time I hear global warming drawing near: how can we design "with" global warming with our contingent evolving elephant-by-the-trunk understanding? How do our desires change in the face of uncertainty? Perhaps the thinking we need for this exists, already as the fingertip-feel of intuition, interaction, and anticipation.
We suggest that limitations on the speed of ice volume (and thus sea level) changes in the paleo-record are more a consequence of the pace of orbital changes and CO2 changes, as opposed to being a result of lethargic ice physics. [http://www.atmos-chem-phys.net/16/3761/2016/acp-16-3761-2016.pdf]
This paper is gripping, especially for layfolk: it takes a strong scientific, engineering, and political stance fully aware of, and hence enlightening, its context. I read in it an awareness that Fox news is too busy with Republican infighting to attack this paper. Perhaps now is a good time for long hard looks.
It is a lesson in how to think about the timescales and history of interlinked feedback loops, like watching someone debug an electrical circuit the size of the planet, flying from the Anarctic to the Bahamas to stick an oscilloscope probe into stone ice and water. It's an intimate text: they're not just thinking that Eemian-era data is relevant to today, they're feeling it, and you can feel it through them. Exploration sparks their explanation; they will not be cowed into detachment and distance.
Stop the tape of evolution anywhere and you won't see it. Stand under a rain cloud and it's not global warming you'll feel. Cut your coat into a thousand pieces—you won't find capital in there. [Hyperobjects, Timothy Morton]
Our awareness that we too are Nature, this decentering of the human that allows us to take a step back and express our humanity by blurring the boundaries between games and players, needs a kind of feeling, consideration, deliberation.
To use the metaphor of our era, we are running an extractive, growth-driven economic operating system that has reached the limits of its ability to serve anyone, rich or poor, human or corporate. [...] We must instead take a good look at the underlying assumptions of the marketplace we're busy digitizing and ask ourselves if they are still relevant to our situation before we let our computers and networks run with them. [Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus, Douglas Rushkoff]
Escape is a form of attachment; there's no way out but through.
"
The necessity or so it seems of forcing
A shape on these of saying like
Of saying see what I see see
What I ask you to see
Seeing
How far you'll go
with or on what
grounds we
Already that shape is dissolving
Already that shape
Already another
[...]
"
[By and By / Lauren Mullen]