yep. #conformists are people we need: they administrate society; they make rules that are then put into place; they enforce laws and diagnose infirmities. but when the systems they administrate and operate daily begin to stumble, their instinct is not to start again, but start better.
the only people capable of changing the world for the better are #nonconformists.
both have their downsides. #putin is a #nonconformist: look how he upturns #paradigms. the #nazis meantime — in a case of crazy shocking conformity — audited their horror like no #bureaucrats ever have.
a final thought: when faced with #nonconformity of the scale of #ukraine’s invasion, and the related cruelties being effected over the past couple of years, we have to be equally wily, unpredictable and smart. laws and their observance — the firmness of #internationaljustice, that is — absolutely needs to be a given. but that wily i alluded to above also needs to be a tool we employ: as the meme above, our current absence of truly deep #nonconformism in our western democratic systems of teamwork where the individual is subsumed to the needs of the group — not only when implementing the startling and operating it but also when thinking it up in the first place — is a considerable weakness.
we should rethink how to foment more constructive #nonconformism in our modern societies: how to recover our childhood capabilities for such enquiry:
ai’s proponents and advocates — of the human-insensitive version of this set of technologies, i mean — have kind of decided on a necessary battlefield between #machines and #humans.
as a #teacher, #trainer and #facilitator during decades this has never been my way. for me, knowledge isn’t how big yours might be but, rather, how well — how pointedly — you learn how to use what you acquire over the years.
speaking well in a language doesn’t require more than 800 words. it’s true. ask #chatgpt-x. what makes the difference is the baggage we bring to each word; the connections; the semantics; the allusions and how we choose not to say exactly what’s expected.
back in 2019 i lost my middle son’s affections. i had to borrow money from him to keep my #startup going. i’ll never get him back — for this and one other, unrelated reason. it was to get the below project off the ground.
in the event, the organisation i submitted to said it was unique (in a good way) and, simultaneously, that it didn’t advance science (in an opposing and bad sense, obviously). they informed me of this unofficially one morning early on — that is, that all my hopes and dreams were dashed — as i stood on a train platform whilst a train came in just that second.
the cctv would have seen me: the organisers themselves could also have seen — if they had wanted or cared to — the cctv of where i was and how i looked. it was obviously a terrible coincidence i resisted the temptation to take advantage of.
none of my three children now speak to me because of #startup-land. but the #philosophy — not the #tech — of the project attached deserves to speak to us, five years later.
let’s allow it to encourage us to be better #techies everywhere. change is inevitable, of course; but in #tech its nature never is. in such moments, in #tech we’re always choosing.
maybe #ai can do a few things humans are paid to do. but that doesn’t mean what we’re paid to do by businesses everywhere consists of what our real creativity as unpredictable humans is being exhibited — or even widely fomented.
the proposition:
maybe #it-#tech’s architectures have for so long forced us — as the humans we are — into undervaluing, underplaying and underusing our properly creative sides, that what #ai’s proponents determine are human creative capabilities are actually the dumbed-down instincts and impulses of what would otherwise be sincerely creative manifestations of human thinking: that is, where given the architectures i suggest we make more widely available — for example, just to start with, a decent return to a secrecy-positive digital form of pencil & paper so we DON’T consistently inhibit real creativity — and therefore encourage a return to our much more creatively childlike states of undeniably out-of-the-box enquiry …
augmentedintuition.com | a historical whitepaper advocating an augmented human intuition
in this sense, then, the real lessons of recent #gpt-x are quite different: not how great #ai is now delivering, but how fundamentally toxic to human creativity the privacy- and secrecy-destroying direction of ALL #it-#tech over the years has become. because this very same #tech did start out in its early days as hugely secrecy- and privacy-sensitive. one computer station; one hard-drive; no physical connections between yours and mine: digital pencil & paper indeed!
it’s only since we started laying down cables and access points for some, WITHOUT amending the radically inhibiting architecture of all-seeing admins overlording minimally-privileged user, that this state of affairs has come about: an #it-mediated and supremely marshalled & controlled human creativity.
no wonder #ai appears so often to be creative. our own human creativity has become winged fatally by #tech, to the extent that the god which is now erected as #ai has begun to make us entirely in HIS image, NOT extend and enhance our own intrinsic and otherwise innate preferences.
summary:
its not, therefore, that #it-#tech has been making #ai more human: it’s that the people who run #bigtech have been choosing to shape humans out of their most essential humanity.
and so as humans who are increasingly less so, we become prostrate-ducks for their business pleasures and goals.
an alternative? #secrecypositive, yet #totalsurveillance-compliant software and hardware architectures: back, then, to recreating the creativity-expanding, enhancing and upskilling tools that a digital pencil & paper used to deliver:
secrecy.plus/spt-it | a return to a secrecy- and privacy-positive “digital pencil & paper”
a final thought:
in a sense, even from #yahoo and #google #search onwards, both the #internet and the #web were soon designed (it’s always a choice, this thing we call change: always inevitable, true, it’s a fact … but the “how” — its nature — is never inevitable) … so from #search onwards, it all — in hindsight — become an inspectorial, scraping set of tools to inhibit all human creative conditions absolutely.
the rationale? well, the rationale being that #bigmoney needed consumers who thought they were creators, not creators who would create distributed and uncontrollable networks of creation under the radar.
and then with the advent of newer #ai tools, which serve primarily to deliver on the all-too-human capability to bullshit convincingly, #it and related are finally, openly, brazenly, shamelessly being turned on all human beings who don’t own the means of production.
we were given the keys to the kingdom, only to discover it was a #panopticon we would never escape from. because instead of becoming the guards, that is to say the watchers, we discovered — too late — we were forcefully assigned the roles of the watched:
and so not owning the means of production, with its currently hugely toxic concentrations of wealth and riches, means that 99.9 percent of us are increasingly zoned out of the minimum conditions a real human creativity needs to even begin to want to function in a duly creative manner at all.
that is to say, imho, practically everything we see in corporate workplaces which claims the tag of creativity is simple repurposing of the existing. no wonder the advocates of #ai are able to gleefully proclaim their offspring’s capabilities to act as substitutes of such “achievements”.
someone asked me this morning why i write. i didn’t answer them.
maybe it was an example of new knowledge for me. my dissertation supervisor, a very brainy person, told me once that we should treasure those moments when we didn’t know how to answer someone: they were examples of new knowledge.
certainly for ourselves, and then again maybe for others too: a wider humanity. in either case, to be valued above almost any other lived experience. because the experience manifests itself in all our endeavours: a common denominator which is neither low nor common, tbh. in work; in academia; at school; in relationships; in a love at first sight … everything i tell you.
why write? not to be read. never. to write in order to be read is to almost surgically remove the very condition good and faithful writing demands to remain faithful and good.
freedom. that’s why i write. to be free. to remain free. to sustain a wider freedom. to ensure liberty remains a goal of all human beings.
you see … to be read is nice but dangerous. to be read is to enter into a dialogue. and in such dialogue we inevitably compromise, fudge, lose our trails of thought, forget the purpose of reflection — and, then, indeed, its power.
that’s not me. and after sixty years of trying to be a writer who is read, i realise it mustn’t be me. because my virtue is that i don’t enter into dialogue before i have my ideas.
actually, that’s not true. by writing, i speak to myself. and this, for me, is key: because it’s truer than true that without this mode of speaking with my being i never am able to know, until i follow the described procedure, what that being thinks.
so if i have to enter into a dialogue with the person who asked me this morning about why i write … well … i write to be free and find out what it is to be me.
is all.
enough?
i give no more.
except a video i just made and then a poem i just wrote this morning at breakfast in stockholm city, sweden.
i’ve been thinking a lot about redemption, ever since a messenger and intermediary said to me in 2016 that my problem was guilt.
she was, on due reflection, wrong. guilt is good, if its reasons for provoking can be assuaged in competent and compassionate manner.
what i still suffer from is an absence of process, in the secular society i cherish, for redemption.
my supposition:
let’s presuppose the following: let’s say that religion served a real positive purpose which in its relative absence now in many of our societies has not been supplanted with other processes as compassionately. i say compassionately with circumspection, of course. religion itself has effected many horrible historical — and even current — events in humanity’s journey.
an example, then, of the redemption i mention?
well. here we are!
discretion is a very humane aspect of criminal justice systems, when used in the spirit of the law and its kindly interpretation.
i studied international criminal justice in 2017 at master’s level and on one occasion stumbled across the following anecdote in the academia i was reading: italy, well known for the misuse of family power and structure, may also invoke the good of family leading to a better criminal justice praxis there.
most crime in all criminal justice systems is committed by young men between the ages of 18 and 26. after that age, almost automagically, its incidence tails off. some suggest there may even exist physiological reasons for this: that young male brains get hard-wired to begin settling at around the upper age band quoted.
either way, we have a criminal justice reality: young men who commit crime are also victims of crime, in the sense that they are the most vulnerable group to enter criminality, and get very little proactive support to stay out of the criminal justice system. more often, in fact, they get targeted — maybe targeted into it — via prejudice and presumption of very many, damning and defining, societal forces.
in italy, then, this was the example: a law-enforcement officer heard of a young man around 17 who had just about committed his first crime; certainly infraction. the officer knew of the family, and instead of “inducting” the youth directly into a path which later would be heading irreversibly towards criminality, he went behind the back of the youngster and straight to his parents.
he explained the situation gently and non-threateningly, explaining that the family could help. here, we could argue, was good discretion operating to the max: even, that it shouldn’t have been necessary to use discretion to keep the young man out of being typed so young as criminality’s cannon fodder. maybe it could be conceivable that the officer’s own kpi-structure and law-enforcement praxis would consist primarily of keeping people out of the system — enabling and allowing them to redeem any initial acts so that criminality became something they themselves wanted to veer from — instead of counting up the number of criminals captured and banged away.
proposal:
on the of the above, and in relation to things i’ve already published on a new concept of criminal justice which i’ve termed natural justice, i’d like to propose that we take the renewed need for a societal infrastructure of redemption to be revisited.
in the absence of father confessors, that is in the absence of many people finding them unsatisfactory to their needs (where they work, no change needed of course!), we should create serious halfway houses between the criminality and zero good of #darkfigure and #neocrime as i understand them at one extreme (the 20 to 40 percent that is the crime and related loopholes invisible to criminal justice) and religiously delivered confession and relief at the other. which for secular societies no longer functions easily.
thinking more philosophically, it’s possible that the behaviours acted out as described in this post, which may then duly and rightfully lead to criminal prosecution, are encouraged because we need to be redeemed — to feel it, i mean. and unless in secular society you enter the criminal justice system, a societal-level redemption is not within reach. if we provided other ways which had nothing to do with criminal justice stigma, perhaps — too! — fewer would wish to be criminals.
i’ve often felt, as a by-the-by and in analogous way, that open-source and social-networked online communities have become so popular and active because in such spaces — the really competent and well-run ones i mean — we find the reality (or even just simulacrum, but at least this) of a democratic discourse that real democracy increasingly is lacking.
what’s clear is there are exist basic human instincts and impulses, and they must always act in pairs.
doing democracy is one; where nowadays the reward for its practice where this doesn’t invoke the relationship of abused partner?
and so doing ill is another; where nowadays the redemption which doesn’t involve punishment and disgrace?
i’m beginning to see a way forwards for my ideas on intuition validation in the context of inspectorial it-tech architectures.
the latter are great at who and when; they’re not fit for purpose — 9/11 showed this clearly — when we’re talking about new kinds of what and how. this, in my view, is because they inevitably inhibit the capacity we otherwise had in pencil & paper days to think profoundly and fearlessly before we showed anything to the outside world. now we simply don’t know who is watching, so not everything we might think even gets thought.
i want us to make the unthinkable as thinkable as possible, in order to prevent the supremely — that is, creatively — bad people on this rock from turning their thoughts into real-world events.
attached some thoughts from my digital note-taking which i’ve delivered this morning.
meantime, here are the slides of one of my recent roadmaps for setting up a company or organisation designed to begin to shape how we might make some of these ideas much more tangible.
foucault said everything is dangerous: and more reason, for this reason, to study everything more deeply.
curie said we shouldn’t fear understanding: almost that it was our duty.
i want, now, to set up a national security facility which uses curie’s approach for its outer core, where our good people learn in supported ways to fight bad people.
and i want then, once we have fashioned the necessary tools, to develop an inner core which gets as pointed as foucault’s persistence re the dangerous.
at the #nobelprize museum today i saw two words on the floor near the entrance, amongst many others. the two i recognised and stood near were in english. i hope one day others i am able to recognise will be in swedish.
my words of preference were “persistence” and “disrespect”. of the two, the one i stood next to first was “disrespect”. not gratuitous: measured. that’s me. and that will always be me.
and that’s what i want to make of the aforementioned national security facility: something deeply infused with a profound lack of respect to the shibboleths of crime and … to what we can or can’t do to stop and dismantle them.
let’s do it.
it’s time we did. time to have confidence in our abilities. our competences. and our integrity.
newton said he saw further because he stood on the shoulders of giants.
but it’s not quite there as a phrase. it used to be for me, but after today it’s not.
not for me.
foucault said everything was dangerous and therefore more reason to be studied.
but that’s fearsome.
terrifying, in fact; maybe unnecessarily so, too.
it was for me when first i read it. even as when i did … well … it became my touchstone.
the pictures above communicate both ideas more humanly. that is, as befits the missions and values of the #nobelprize: don’t only achieve the most we can with grandeur, but achieve all of this and more with real and cogent ideals.
even idealism.
yes.
yes.
even this.
the first pictures show, then, these giant women and men moving above us; looking down as we look up. and we look up not to be looked down upon, but in beautiful admiration for — even adoration of — the elegance of their thought and endeavour.
and then again, neither do they look down upon us to diminish but, instead, to amplify our mutual connections and shared humanity. because as they move above us so high, the collective they start out as when we come in the entrance to the museum itself separates firmly and graciously, the deeper we go, into a rollcall of wondrous individuals.
because a collective based on anything else is no collective at all.
and this is #sweden and #norway and #scandinavia all over.
and this is why i feel at home with you — even as you might not feel quite at home with me, quite yet.
and then the last few pictures of the blackboard with chalked words basically say in #swedish and #english what foucault said years later.
but the thought is expressed much more kindly; it is said with equal passion it is true … but also with a profound and patent COMpassion. something i think foucault found more challenging. much much more challenging.
what he was, too. also a thinker of the mightiest. it’s how he was; and we have to — all of us — learn to become what we are.
and so that’s why i don’t want to fall into the trap of comparing. i just want to say that marie skłodowska curie’s much earlier enunciation of what has to be considered a universal truth makes me feel human again where foucault never could:
“Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood.
Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.”
i’ve been a #language trainer and user for most of my life; therefore, in many respects a #conformist. rules, then, that needed to be learnt and followed.
but whilst the terms grammar and nazi often go hand-in-hand, being a #proofreader these days and in charge of the #qualitycontrol of documentation in a number of formats doesn’t make one inflexible. not if one wants to do one’s job usefully.
rules are not created to be broken. they’re not even created to be bent. they’re here to be interpreted. and this is what i really love about all the kinds of language i’ve come across in my life — from html code way-back-then to the russian language which i learnt for three years via my knowledge of spanish (that is, castellano). as well as the symbolism employed frequently by both manifest #mafias as well as their de facto cousins of often professional praxis and communities, and which i deepened my knowledge of during and since my #criminaljustice master at liverpool’s #ljmu.
so.
although i’ve been that language teacher for a lot of my professional life, there is nothing of the nazi in me at all: neither professionally nor personally. an attachment to the concept of there existing more examples of universal truths than we care these days to accept, for sure. but a desire and vocation to be flexible as well as firm in everything.
below, then, a glossary page to be built on of my thought’s progression these past sixty years or so.
‘would love to get feedback and engagement for a change. well. wouldn’t you, too?
over the years, since i’ve started proposing seeing intuitive thinking as a logical dataset we should spend a lot more money on capturing, verifying and validating in systemic, human-empowering, inside-out ways, i’ve spoken to a lot of technologists.
without exception — except tbh just this last wednesday when i was at an aws-organised event in stockholm — ALL software engineers and imagineers of this kind have shown fabulous and rightful enthusiasm for the demonstrable machine progress we’ve historically witnessed since the start of humanity’s extension via tools — and yet have been absolutely resistant, sometimes to the point of rudeness, to the idea that we may move human goalposts in equal measure: that is, decide to promote the 90 percent of the human brain most of us are still apparently unable to advantage ourselves of.
one super-interesting aws person i spoke to on wednesday, for most of the evening in fact, on and off, told me at one point that the human brain only uses around 40 watts to do all the amazing things practically all examples of the same which have populated this rock since human history began have clearly been able to deliver on. compare and contrast this with the megawatts needed to run a data centre, able even now only to approach human creative capabilities.
but even on wednesday at the aws event, tbh, techie people were unable to show as deep an enthusiasm for progressing humans in the way i would advocate: not within a lifetime as we have been encouraged to assume are the only goalposts we can move, but intergenerationally, which is what i am increasingly proposing.
that is, actually create a tech philosophy which mimics what film and movie tech have done for over a hundred years: make humans more important to all industrial process through dynamics of industrialisation, instead of ensuring we are less substantial and significant through procedures of automation, obviously designed to reduce our future-present relevance.
because when you hear proponents of generative ai, of any ai, the excitement is palpable: “look what they can now do: write school and university essays that look academically rigorous.”
or write code with just a verbal instruction, is the latest one.
what they don’t ask is whether it was a task which human beings should have been asked to do in the first place.
or, more pointedly, a task which the human beings who did do it competently should have been remunerated to the extreme levels they have historically been remunerated to, for carrying out in ways that — privately speaking, admit it! — became so easy for them to charge exorbitantly for.
in my own auto-ethnographic case, i always got lower marks in my education than my brains indicated i deserved. my latest master was in international criminal justice: during the 2016-2017 academic year in the uk. i always assumed i was lazy. you see, i used a process which wasn’t academically orthodox: i’d create through my brain’s tangential procedures a brand new idea (new for me, anyways), and only then proceed to read relevant literature … if, that is, it existed. back to front. altogether. and marked down, completely all the time.
and in the light of chatgpt’s achievements, i also begin to wonder: because this kind of tech, to me, is nothing more than incredibly deepened search engines. but weren’t the humans who did such jobs also “only” this? really, only this.
and so people who scored well in analogous manual activities were therefore good not at creating new worlds with their academia and coding and software development but, rather, capable at little more than grandiosely integrating essentially tech-informed step-by-step approaches into the otherwise naturally, ingeniously and much more multi-layered human mind.
and so these kinds of students used procedures which were far more appropriate to it-tech environments, and thus scored highly in such education systems.
when truly we should have long ago considered such procedures an absolute anathema to all that COULD make human thought magnificent.
i mean … think the aforementioned 90 percent of the brain whose employment we may still not manage to optimise. and then consider a software or tech platform where its creators tolerate not using 90 percent of its monetising abilities.
really, it’s this: that is, my experience with technologists of all kinds who work in it-tech, where automation is absolute king. (and i say “king” advisably.) they love telling the world how their latest robot — or whatever — will soon be indistinguishable from real human beings in how it looks, speaks, moves and interacts more widely. but why?
the technical achievement is clear. the monetisation opportunities of convincing solitary individuals they need robotic company in place of other human beings are also manifest. but the “why” we should be such advocates of machine progress and yet, simultaneously, UTTERLY INCAPABLE of showing the same levels of enthusiasm for considering we might create environments and thinking-spaces — as i have been suggesting for five or more years — that make intergenerational human advancement possible with the support and NOT domination of tech (that is, as per what movies and films have delivered for humans for that hundred years or so, and NOT as per the relationship between human beings and vast swathes of it-land since, say, the 1950s) … well, this is surely difficult for anyone to understand and explain. unless, of course, we really are talking womb envy: “i can’t bring a human being into the world as completely as a woman can, so instead i’ll make machines that do what humans do, only allegedly better.”
🙂
wdyt?
any truth in any of the above?
why do the boys in tech-land get so enthusiastic about the latest technologies that overtake apparently deep human capabilities — and yet reject so fervently and consistently the possibility that humans might also be able to use equal but repurposed tech to make humans more? but as humans?
mil's page 