It's a Tool
It's a Person
It's a Hypervigilance Problem

The tech industry's insistence on distinguishing between "soft skills" โ€” caring for people โ€” and "hard skills" โ€” engineering rigor โ€” 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 โ€” the woman who coined the term "software engineering" โ€” understood this. Silicon Valley chose to forget.

We're watching the wine glass break in real time. ๐Ÿท

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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

It's a Tool, It's a Person, It's a Hypervigilance Problem

The Alignment Problem is the Halting Problem wearing a trenchcoat. The software that runs the world โ€” including AI โ€” is built on a substrate that cannot observe itself. We've known this since 1951. We built civilization on it anyway.

systemic.engineering

A sneak peek into my upcoming piece: โ€œItโ€™s a Tool, Itโ€™s a Person: The Math Says Youโ€™re Both Rightโ€

โ€”
AI separated from Cybernetics in 1956 at the Dartmouth Conference. Wiener, the mind behind Cybernetics, was considered difficult and political. โ€œArtificial Intelligenceโ€ 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

Neuroqueer Meeting Group โ€” MoCo Pride Center

Join MoCo Pride Center for a social meet-up group for neurodivergent and LGBTQIA+ community members! Connect with others that experience Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), ADHD , dyslexia and other learning disorders, and/or Tourette Syndrome (TS). Click to learn more and register!

MoCo Pride Center

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 Waiting Room

A neuroqueer engineer dies and gets put in a holding cell in the afterlife. They make coffee. It gets complicated.

systemic.engineering

Irish charity organisation ShoutOut has launched NeuroQueer, a new resource for LGBTQ+ neurodivergent people in Ireland*.

It includes practical tools, supports and myth-busting, as well as personal stories reflecting the queer neurodivergent experience.

(*free download for anyone)

https://www.shoutout.ie/neuroqueer

#neuroqueer #neurodivergent #queer

NeuroQueer โ€” ShoutOut

A new resource by ShoutOut exploring what it means to be both neurodivergent and LGBTQI+, two identities are rarely talked about together.

ShoutOut
Labels Give Access, Lenses Give Way

A short reflection on whatโ€™s useful and real.

Medium

The first neuroqueer meeting at the MoCo Pride Center is happening today at noon. It is followed at 2pm by a board game event. (Times are US Eastern.)

Come watch me fall flat on my face.  

https://www.mocopridefamily.org/events/neuroqueer-meeting-group

https://www.mocopridefamily.org/events/gfghled92vvbdlbvcp7xmwx62q3x9e-z3jfm-23mdl-lb8hz-r4jfy-x8nc6-t5r7m-ezm54-shkhb-7lazf

#NeuroqueerMeetings #neuroqueer #BoardGames #queer #neurodivergent

Neuroqueer Meeting Group โ€” MoCo Pride Center

Join MoCo Pride Center for a social meet-up group for neurodivergent and LGBTQIA+ community members! Connect with others that experience Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), ADHD , dyslexia and other learning disorders, and/or Tourette Syndrome (TS). Click to learn more and register!

MoCo Pride Center