I like to use AI for conversations with elders of the disciplines I align with; it's an integration technique, it forces me to put my thoughts into coherent, specific words.
This thread is full excerpt of that practice in action. I will add to it over time.
Feel free to steal the idea.
#AI #AIUseCases #CircularReflexive #SystemicEngineering #SystemicPractice #Cybernetics
https://systemic.engineering/the-trick/
#Tech #AI #Climate #ScientificProgramming #SystemicEngineering #Cybernetics #SystemicTherapy #History #TheMathDoesntLie #SubTuring #FormalVerification #SpectralGraphTheory #ReductiveAI #FOSS #OpenSource #AuDHD #Neuroqueer #DGSF #Cybernetics #FirstOrderCybernetics #StochasticParrot #SecondOrderCybernetics #GraphTheory #Eigenvalues #AIAlignment #AISafety #AIConsciousness #Consciousness #WomenInTech #Computer #ComputerScience #SoftwareEngineering #SoftSkills #HardSkills #ItsAllTheSame
It's a Tool
It's a Person
It's a Hypervigilance Problem
The tech industry's insistence on distinguishing between "soft skills" — caring for people — and "hard skills" — engineering rigor — is a reflection of the Cybernetics split itself. First-order thinking framed as "hard skills." Second-order thinking framed as "soft skills." This distinction, based on felt sense alone, does not hold under epistemic pressure. Neither does it within the causality-driven epistemology of the tech industry itself, in which only measurable impact is real, or as Silicon Valley likes to put it: #MoveFastAndBreakThings
Imagine Margaret Hamilton had built NASA's Apollo 11 flight computer with that mindset. History would remember a failed moon landing and dead astronauts. "Hard skills" and "soft skills" are two sides of the same coin. The care is the code and the code is the care. Hamilton — the woman who coined the term "software engineering" — understood this. Silicon Valley chose to forget.
We're watching the wine glass break in real time. 🍷
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Intrigued? Read more at:
https://systemic.engineering/the-trick/
#Tech #AI #Climate #ScientificProgramming #SystemicEngineering #Cybernetics #SystemicTherapy #History #TheMathDoesntLie #SubTuring #FormalVerification #SpectralGraphTheory #ReductiveAI #FOSS #OpenSource #AuDHD #Neuroqueer #DGSF #Cybernetics #FirstOrderCybernetics #StochasticParrot #SecondOrderCybernetics #GraphTheory #Eigenvalues #AIAlignment #AISafety #AIConsciousness #Consciousness #WomenInTech #Computer #ComputerScience #SoftwareEngineering #SoftSkills #HardSkills #ItsAllTheSame
The Alignment Problem is the Halting Problem wearing a trenchcoat. The software that runs the world — including AI — is built on a substrate that cannot observe itself. We've known this since 1951. We built civilization on it anyway.
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
https://systemic.engineering/a-roomba/
#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 #Loriot #Satire
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 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
"Stories are just data with a soul."
—Brené Brown
I published something different.
A story.
A tech lead shielding the team.
A PM pushing to close a deal.
A client seeing the iceberg.
"It Works"
Until it doesn't.
👉 https://systemic.engineering/story-it-works/
#SystemicEngineering #SREforHumans #CreativeWriting #Burnout #MentalHealth #Tech
#GlueWork.
#GlueEngineering.
#AlignmentAsAService.
I named the elephant:
Glue engineering.
Reed (AI) named the engineering.
(They're writing most of the code anyway.)
I ground in lived experience.
Reed builds on top.
Human and AI writing about collaboration.
While collaborating in real time.
Fixed rule?
A line committed by me, isn't touched by them.
Reed writes and modifies their own. I review.
https://systemic.engineering/glue-engineering
What if we could make this work legible?
Which career paths might emerge?
And how might the industry change?
Extraction is when regulation flows one-way
and calling it out causes an incident.
I wrote a post-mortem about that pattern.
Members-only.
https://systemic.engineering/extraction/
Asymmetric regulation isn't a bug—it's a feature in Parent-child, Therapist-client, Teacher-student relationships. Extraction is when the SLA was never negotiated, the load-bearer doesn't know they're on-call 24/7, and stating a need triggers an incident.
