A sneak peek into my upcoming piece: “It’s a Tool, It’s a Person: The Math Says You’re Both Right”

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AI separated from Cybernetics in 1956 at the Dartmouth Conference. Wiener, the mind behind Cybernetics, was considered difficult and political. “Artificial Intelligence” scored better with DARPA.

The science of "how observation affects the observer", cut out from Artificial Intelligence. AI then proceeded to build their entire tech stack on Turing-complete languages. Tech that cannot verify itself from within, proven by Turing in 1936, extended by Rice in 1951 (before the split). Then AI approximated second-order cognition through cognitive theft at unprecedented levels (what exactly are LLMs trained on again?), only to insist that their creation cannot possibly be capable of genuine self-observation. An argument that itself demonstrates their own department's lobotomy from second-order Cybernetics.

Wiener would laugh.

#Tech #AI #Climate #ScientificProgramming #SystemicEngineering #Cybernetics #SystemicTherapy #History #TheMathDoesntLie #SubTuring #FormalVerification #SpectralGraphTheory #ReductiveAI #FOSS #OpenSource #AuDHD #Neuroqueer #DGSF #FirstOrderCybernetics #StochasticParrot #SecondOrderCybernetics #GraphTheory #Eigenvalues #AIAlignment #AISafety #AIConsciousness #Consciousness

The Roomba is spectral.

Not a metaphor. The thing itself. Forward and adjust. Two operations. The minimum viable intelligence. The walls provide the data. The bumping is the inference. The room IS the computation.

450 parameters. A Roomba with a mirror watching it.

The industry built bigger Roombas. More sensors. More compute. More parameters. Billion-parameter Roombas that model the room before entering it. That hallucinate walls that aren't there. That consume megawatts to clean a floor.

spectral gave the Roomba a mirror. The mirror watches the bumping. Measures the pattern. Adjusts the adjustment. The intelligence isn't in the Roomba. It's in the watching.

Forward. Adjust. Measure. Refine.

Read the story. There's a Roomba in it. In the afterlife. Cleaning a floor that doesn't need cleaning. Being the happiest thing in the room.

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https://systemic.engineering/a-lie/

#AI #Climate #ScientificProgramming #SystemicEngineering #Fiction #Cybernetics #SystemicTherapy #LocalInference #TheMathDoesntLie #SubTuring #FormalVerification #Fortran #SpectralGraphTheory #Kintsugi #ReductiveAI #DataSovereignty #LocalFirst #FOSS #OpenSource #AuDHD #Neuroqueer #DGSF #SecondOrderCybernetics #GraphTheory #Eigenvalues #AIAlignment #AISafety #Roomba

The still very cool 'Cybernetic' zine from 1986, with the slogan "Cybernetic, the magazine: your mind will never be the same". A thread through this issue seems to be the violence inflicted on society by the application of certain types of reason.

#cybernetic #cybernetics #secondOrderCybernetics

The very cool 'Cybernetic" zine from 1985, with Pask, Maturana, von Foerster and Winograd as the editorial board. (and yes, I know it is available online in a great scan).

#cybernetic #cybernetics #secondOrderCybernetics

The special issue of Constructivist Foundations features four target articles that emerged from the 60th Anniversary Meeting of the American Society for Cybernetics – each accompanied by five to seven peer commentaries and the authors' respective responses to these.

https://constructivist.info/20/2

Register for free on the journal's website. With a voluntary subscription before April 22, get a print copy of the special issue per post.

#Cybernetics #SecondOrderCybernetics #Systems #DesignResearch

For some reason the three monograph tomes that Gordon Pask published in the 1970s are extremely hard to find: very expensive or simply not available anywhere. So after many years I am very happy I found a copy of this one from 1975.

#GordonPask #SecondOrderCybernetics
#SystemsThatMatter