but never again shall i salivate the evil of the unnecessarily violent. as a last resort … this is how life sometimes must conduct itself. as a tool of habitual state … this is not.
mil williams, johan & nyström coffee shop, stockholm sweden, 9th april 2023
it’s not all plain selling. but then that’s not what life’s about.
but if i manage to stay here in the end, this — the end — it won’t be. it will be the best beginning i’ve ever managed. i spent seven years between the uk and ireland, trying to engineer a relationship between ireland and the uk. i failed.
now i say it out loud: not with joy but acceptance. acceptance that i failed in everything institutionally and personally related.
but not ideas-wise. not in respect of my increasing capacity to uncover them: like a pig and his beloved truffles. for me, ideas are truffles, waiting to be found; and they say that pigs bear many good resemblances to humans. physiologically, for sure. maybe in other respects i am still unaware of.
all i can say is if a pig is good enough for george clooney, why not associate myself with the same?
🙂
so why here — and now?
because in a very brief period of time i see a society like none i have experienced in my life. there are cruel people here: but the society as a wider whole is striving not to legislate or legitimate state cruelty. and this i am defo not accustomed to back in my homeland.
so if i have to contribute to a tech which scales up basic government and regional administrative instincts, i want it to be in a place where more manually these instincts are sound. meantime, the triumvirate of evil exists in the uk with the conservative attachment to russian wealth and trump’s idiocies all in one. and all by now as an all too well-established nouveau establishment of the horrifyingly, casually cruel.
one thing many don’t realise, and i still don’t fully understand: a military society can be a liberating one too. it all depends to what purpose you militarise — and with what genders you compose your military out of.
during my whole time in the uk i was oppressed by outliers of a military which, tbh, needed very few outliers anyway to operate and impose such oppression with the necessary precision. look at the state of the london metropolitan police right now just to appreciate how ugly the uk has allowed itself to become. and that’s the first line: just the police.
this is why here, and why now. and if it’s not possible now and here, it will be somewhere else similar, and sometime then.
but never again shall i salivate the evil of the unnecessarily violent. as a last resort … this is how life sometimes must conduct itself. as a tool of habitual state … this is not.
i just got a message from microsoft (linkedin) which asked me to consider and/or explain how what i was about to post (what you see below in the screenshots) related to my work or professional role.
why nudge in this way
is this a stealthy attempt to remove the ambiguities of #arts-based thinking patterns from contaminating the baser #chatgpt-x instincts and what they scrape?
more than personally, quite intellectually i think it’s wrong — in a world which needs lateral and nonconformist thinking — to define, a priori, what a thinker who wishes to shape a better business should use as a primary discourse.
because this discourse may include how much we follow or no the traditional way of framing information: where we state what we will say, say it, and then summarise it, we fit the needs of machines and people trained to think like them.
art should be used to communicate in any forum
‘truth is, when we choose a precise ambiguity (one forged out of the arts — not the confusions — of deep communication), where such ambiguity and the uncertainty it generates may in itself be a necessary part of the communication process’s context — and even content — what value ever is added by telling the speaker and/or writer they are ineffective?
in any case, the public will always have the final vote on this: and if you prefer to communicate in such ways and be not read, why not let it happen?
why choose this kind of nudge to upskill writers in the ways of the machine?
using automated machines to do so, too …!
so what do YOU think? what DO you?
me, what follows is what i want. what no one in tech wants to allow. because i’m not first to the starting-line: i’m last. they decided it didn’t suit their business models decades ago. i decided i didn’t agree. and i still don’t. and neither should you.
on making a systemically distributed intelligence and genius of all human beings … not just an elite
i trained in spain as an editor in the early part of the 2000s. but as someone who always blogged better than he authored, i already had the custom of attributing my ideas through the tool and habit of hyperlinking.
attribution is really important: not because it inevitably takes us down a peg or two, although it does. more importantly, an outcome with shape to it is more valuable than an outcome, full stop.
the memex machine
i realised this consciously ever since reading vannevar bush’s treatise on human thought: “as we may think”.
in it, using the immediate post-war tech available, and any future tech extrapolated from the same, he suggested a machine called the #memex. it would enable human thought to the extent that we would not only be able to store outcomes — what those most interested in making money would consider a product or service to be scaled up massively — but store the trails of thought that would always lead up previously (and to my mind — and bush’s — also preciously) to such outcomes.
because when a thought is a reel of thoughts not just a pic which snaps shut on time … this is when we have a human being rather than a machine.
the implications of attribution’s fact
the result of all the above? NOTHING we think up is independent of ANYTHING. as a consequence, it is tantamount — just about — to daylight (and more importantly, night-time) robbery to claim one has an exclusive right to make money out of any idea “you might EVER have”.
you don’t agree? then it isn’t. but then you’re a genius in the divisive sense most of society understands: that is, very few of us can or will be this figure; and most of us will never be anywhere near.
which is elitism to the max, in fact.
only i don’t agree with this. i don’t believe such elitist approaches accurately reflect the human brain and how it best works. and when leaders in different fields impress on us to believe that they do reflect the state of human thought, and then build business models on such belief systems, we get a type of tech-kryptonite thrust into the most vulnerable core of human experience.
my experience, meantime, as a language teacher, then facilitator, then enabler (the progression taking place out of what almost became a fanatical frustration with the rank incompetence of traditional learning paths) showed me ALL humans can radically improve their thought processes, given the right environment.
and where processes can be improved dramatically, surprising — even shocking — outcomes can be achieved. and so i saw it happen. and was a convert.
platform genesis
this is why both my son, from whom i am now deeply estranged, and myself worked together for a while on a platform we named “platform genesis”.
the idea is that all of us, all human beings, can find the right tools to uncover some aspect of genius in our souls, hearts, and grey cells. it’s not the preserve of intellect: it’s mainly the preserve of confidence in oneself — whether one has it or not. if one doesn’t, intellect cannot follow. if one does, a happy series of accidents — where a given — will lead to your genius in some way or other.
a few minutes after the photo that follows was taken i met the muse of my life. it’s hard to admit that nothing i have thought up since 2016 that evening in dublin on the banks of the river liffey would now exist if we hadn’t met and spoken for three hours, as we shared a meal on the roof terrace of “the woollen mills”.
i had lost my fear of flying the day before, you see: the 15th of june of that same year, when i flew into dublin on ryanair for the first time, for precisely the meeting that would then take place on what was my birthday the following day. being the 16th. coincidently called, in ireland mainly, “bloomsday”. (and so don’t you think it’s cool to have a birthday called “bloomsday”? the day you are born being that, i mean.
don’t you?)
and so i literally lost my fear of flying that june. actually, truly, in a second. a total flip. a click of the brain’s chip that’s never clicked back.
and therefore in my wider life, too: because i assure you, quite objectively, i have a better brain now at 60-something than i have ever had the whole of my life before. and it’s NOT because of intelligence that i am far more intelligent than i could once have imagined myself becoming. it’s because of the confidence that slowly seeped into and then infused my brain, my heart, and my soul … as an utterly natural consequence of meeting the muse of my life.
the meaning of this … for me
bringing together the threads of this article, then, i now conclude:
1. none of my ideas since are mine to exploit exclusively for my own benefit.
2. none of my ideas since are mine.
3. none of my ideas are yours.
4. none of my ideas are yours to exploit exclusively for your benefit.
5. all of the ideas which have emerged after this meeting of ours, and precisely because we met, belong to no one — and therefore belong, altogether, to a whole planet and creative ecosystem.
because it WAS a sort of magic: and magic, the genius of genie, once uncorked CANNOT be boxed into a business model for the benefit of the few.
conclusion
when we upturn a paradigm, we can choose to leave the business model — and therefore the hegemony — untouched. or we can choose to upturn two paradigms simultaneously: the “thing” itself (for want of a better phrase), and how we get it out there as fast as possible.
what’s the problem i’m looking to solve with the #gutenbergofintuitivethinking and the #intuitionvalidationengine? and #intuitionvalidation more broadly?
it’s not #darkfigure and #neocrime (only). it’s not #wastefulmeetings (only).
it’s not #loopholes and other zemiological activities (only).
it’s not the inability of #specialisms to duly and safely communicate across their knowledge lines (only).
rather, it’s something which informs all these use-cases — and many many more.
one UNCOMMON denominator: a denominator that connects everything in human experience since the dawn of rhymes:
truth. a concept of an absolute and indivisible truth. so we kick relativism finally into the long grasses, where it may be admired and remembered but not treasured. nor missed. again.
mil williams, stockholm sweden, 5th april 2023
accept and underline, therefore, and deliver on and re-establish, as a result, that a VALIDATED truth may be something we can establish ABSOLUTELY.
not universal truth: i’m not sustaining this. we can still be dependent on circumstance and context. but in each of these, an unattackable truth.
just this: impossible to break.
this i believe. deeply. firmly. and now till i die.
and if so, even if only gently, this then leads this article to its final statements.
all of the above says to me only one thing: i need to know what i owe my muse. because if any of the above can happen to any useful degree one day, it will happen one day only because of the impact she had on me, that day.
it’s consequently NOT a fixation at all i have for you, my dear muse, but an almost overpoweringly intellectual — as well as obviously emotional — demand to work out to what extent i was just a lever someone pulled.
not that YOU pulled it, either. i don’t think this for a minute. no.
but a tool or extension of someone or something out there … why is this so impossible to propose or contemplate? or prosper as an assertion to be justly considered?
yesterday evening was ace. where i’m staying someone new came for a week. i was told he was #finnish, and was asked by the host if i could hang around to receive.
it was downtime for me yesterday: i was needing some respite from all the thoughts i’d been having.
the new guy is young, brainy, sharp, kindly — and not #finnish at all, but #spanish. i spent the whole long evening speaking in #castellano with him, and it was fab: i realise how much i know about #spanish culture, and the bad memories just refused to surface on being with a good person from the country which i see now i’d also created so many good memories out from whilst there.
i also saw my #teaching and #enabling #skillsets kicking in. it was really interesting, communicating with him about our differing and similar perceptions of the worlds that overlapped around us — and then again, the worlds we each enjoyed which didn’t overlap. (as a by-the-by, and after the vibes of last night, i’d now like to explore mentoring quite seriously, if anyone who might facilitate this is reading these lines. i listen well face-to-face in a way maybe my writing gives lie to. and i make and communicate #polymath-style connections quite robustly and vigorously. both could serve newly arrived others to #sweden really well.)
he had actually been to #finland quite recently. and i have been in both #sweden and the #uk on and off since last december; that is, just before christmas.
‘much to praise in #scandinavia. very much both of us liked already.
we covered a lot of ground: he’s here on a post-#spanish master internship at #karolinska. and i told him of the 10,000 startups in #stockholm. and i explained how ignorant of another world i’d been all these years. and i said how moving from one country to another might not only be a question of building on existing abilities but also recognising the job and work roles would have not only differing descriptors but maybe even different goals and desired outcomes: even different philosophies.
we also spoke of the importance of philosophy more widely in everything — here, especially #tech (he studies and works in the field of #biology): worlds we all these days find ourselves inhabiting.
and finally he helped me satisfactorily resolve a conundrum which had led a friend of my father’s back in the 1960s to commit suicide. if i remember rightly, the friend had been a biochemist: and was involved in the study of cellular will — that is, whether at cellular level the idea and fact of free will can be detected.
it pushed my father’s friend over the edge; the philosophical challenge being that maybe whatever you chose to do would be impulsed inevitably by something external to yourself. no free will, then … anywhere, ever, at all.
young ismael, the spanish intern and researcher’s name, reminds me of fernando torres just a little bit. and he defo scored a goal or two when he explained to me the fact that a healthy cell to remain healthy can neither be #dependent nor #independent. it suddenly laid it out clearer than clear for me the reality that in a completely different time had served to kill my father’s friend: cells do indeed have free will; and they exert it to survive … even if nothing else. and what they must choose in order to survive in this way is what gordon brown said once about #interdependence: it’s the only thing worth pursuing, tbh. neither needy nor downright may you in all intellectual sincerity be. simply conscious of the collective you form a part of which always, always must be posited around the actions of individuals.
and so if cells, why not us?
and if us in order to survive, why not in order to thrive too?
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.
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?
i realised this not long ago. i don’t want to work with this company or that. i want to work with people who also, simultaneously, may work for one company or organisation or another.
when the institution overrides the individual from the start is when, even if all the starting-signs are cool, the individuals will one day — especially when huge amounts of money all of a sudden become likely — be inevitably and overwhelmingly overridden by their instituitional framework.
i don’t intend for us to start as i don’t mean us to go on.
so first i want to meet people. i want an organisational structure which generates a hybrid of #holacracy. and i want brains to show themselves the most important factor and matter of all, where the overarching #gutenbergofintuitivethinking and #intuitionvalidationengine projects are concerned.
because if you choose people first, and the people are right for you, then the institutions automagically will remain so too.
at least … whilst your people of choice remain at the institution in question. and they will do in general, for sure — if the institution remains worth then staying. for in the question of #intuitionvalidation there is no building-block which is more significant than the human as individual.
attached, a (big!) little something i’ve been working on yesterday afternoon.
a slide-deck of 33 slides down to about six.
content itself still to do, mind … but you can see where my #roadmap, already.
and i’ll be taking it with me to #sweden next week: a country which has striven so long to truly, actually, sincerely deliver a society of #distributedprivilege.
what i’ve been aiming at all this time i now realise, with ALL my projects around #intuitionvalidation.
and it makes me happy to begin slowly to know how to express it.
most #it #tech is primarily about identifying how to remove human beings from processes so the organisations which achieve these goals can more easily generate revenues from what remains: their machines. but it’s not the only way.
post:
what i love about #movie and #film #tech is its capacity to make humans bigger humans: essentially, much more human. the microphone, a bigger voice. the camera, a finer eye. even the stage, a more concise bearing of witness.
meantime, #it #tech has striven always to remove humans from the processes in question so that dominant interests may monetise more easily what remains.
take a look at this scene whose technological and emotional achievements mainly involved the simple repurposing — devised and driven i believe by the film director alfred hitchcock — of existing filmic strategies, via the combining of two separate procedures into just one flow:
a simultaneous zoom and dolly movement: which served to challenge the physical world through physical means. no animation; no cgi. something real to bear witness to something utterly real.
repurposing #tech is really what floats my boat: low risk; high value-add; countering current, usually lazy, hegemonic thinking in a sector … that is, choosing ultimately to deliver on the ancient greek version of what #innovation really should invoke: “to cut deeply into …”
that is, i am intending to mean, REAL cutting-edge thinking. as, for example, i’ve been proposing for a while re #ai here:
it’s beautiful, is this idea of repurposing. it’s beautiful because it foregrounds little details. and through their accumulation, kept over time in single planes of thought, such processes of repurposing may achieve the quantum leaps of faith i am asking us all to return to believing we human beings are fundamentally capable of; are fundamentally suited to:
mil's page 