Archive

AI Policy, Is It Possible? Is It Necessary?

When we talk about tech­nolo­gies such as AI, and pol­i­cy, one of the main prob­lems is that tech­no­log­i­cal advance­ment is fast, and pol­i­cy and democ­ra­cy is a very very slow process. And that could be poten­tial­ly a very big prob­lem if we think that AI could be poten­tial­ly dangerous.

Challenging the Audience to Work in Anti-Disciplinary Spaces

I came into doing work in an antidis­ci­pli­nary space more or less by acci­dent. Back when I was apply­ing to uni­ver­si­ty, the schools would send out these books talk­ing about the dif­fer­ent pro­grams they offered and what each pro­gram was like. And for some rea­son I nev­er read any of those books. I just applied to engi­neer­ing school because I thought, Oh, you know I like to make things, and engi­neer­ing school’s where you make things.” 

The Art of Discovery, As Seen by a Physicist

The sci­en­tif­ic method was per­fect­ed in the cru­cible of nat­ur­al sci­ence, and physics in par­tic­u­lar. And an old pro­fes­sor of mine once told me that a good the­o­ret­i­cal physi­cist is intrin­si­cal­ly a lazy per­son. And so these heuris­tics of ignor­ing super­flu­ous detail, sim­pli­fy­ing the prob­lem to its barest essen­tials, maybe even mak­ing a car­i­ca­ture out of it, solv­ing that sim­pler prob­lem. If you can’t solve that sim­pler prob­lem, solve an even sim­pler prob­lem. This actu­al­ly works in physics. Because the uni­verse is intrin­si­cal­ly a lazy place.

Making/Meaning in the Realm of Anti-Disciplinarity

What does it mean to be antidis­ci­pli­nary? To me, it means strug­gle. Sometimes, work­ing in inter­dis­ci­pli­nary fields, I felt like I’ve maybe tried real­ly hard work­ing and work­ing and work­ing on a project, and I was­n’t see­ing any dif­fer­ence. Sometimes peo­ple would look at me and be like, What are you even doing?” So, to me antidis­ci­pli­nar­i­ty means not only not work­ing in one spe­cif­ic field, but rather instead draw­ing from else­where to imag­ine some­thing new.

1983: A Blackened Window on the World

Rammellzee […] con­sid­ered graf­fi­ti as virus­es. And what he liked to do was to con­nect his pro­duc­tion to mil­i­tary lan­guage. He was say­ing that the graf­fi­ti artists were in a kind of sym­bol­ic cam­paign against the stan­dard­iza­tion of the alphabet.

The Internet of Damned Things

We have to be aware that when you cre­ate mag­ic or occult things, when they go wrong they become hor­ror. Because we cre­ate tech­nolo­gies to soothe our cul­tur­al and social anx­i­eties, in a way. We cre­ate these things because we’re wor­ried about secu­ri­ty, we’re wor­ried about cli­mate change, we’re wor­ried about threat of ter­ror­ism. Whatever it is. And these devices pro­vide a kind of stop­gap for help­ing us feel safe or pro­tect­ed or whatever.