celiottjohnston

[celiottjohnston]

Tumblr Live = Changing Platforms

To any readers who are interested in my continuing to follow my writing, I'd like you to know that I am in the process of migrating away from Tumblr. Though Tumblr has always been a platform of debatable taste with a clear, sophomoric agenda, its ease of use has always outweighed these downsides. Yet their recent embrace and consistent promotion of the "Tumblr Live" functionality—which seems to aiming at winning market share from other, more repellent platforms—is a bridge too far.

With Tumblr seemingly committed to pursing this lowest common denominator user strategy my migration to the Medium platform has begun.

I will post once more on this account, when migration is complete. It will remain intact as an archive, but go inactive from that point on.

#tumblr live #leaving

[celiottjohnston]

An excellent breakdown of the differences between modernity, postmodernity, and metamodernity in film.

#metamodernism #film #cinema #Youtube

[celiottjohnston]

Opinion: (Repost) “With Great Data Comes Great Responsibility: AI, Conscientiousness, Creativity, and Exploration”

I recently wrote and published the following article for Triptych, the interactive design firm where I am a partner and the acting CSO. 

In the face of a tidal wave of consumer enthusiasm, a new crop of artificial narrow intelligence (ANI), tools have set off a sort of technological arms race. Refined, foundational generative adversarial networks (GAN), and generative pre-trained transformers (GPT) now offer users the necessary processing bandwidth to follow their visual and intellectual whims, with incredible results achieved at previously unimaginable speeds.

In response to this need, a cohort of innovators are scurrying to capitalize on the AI frenzy, each striving to seize the attention of a voracious audience propelled by both anticipation and apprehension. However, if we pause for a moment to reexamine the past, and consider the fallout of emotionally-charged adoptions of pioneering technologies — such as asbestos, DDT, the dotcom bubble, subprime loans, or social media — what do we discover? Have we genuinely comprehended the full trajectory of this technology, or are we pressing ahead with progress for progress’ sake? More significantly, what concessions are we making by permitting our FOMO to override our executive function?

In light of the recent advancements in these exponentially more sophisticated ANI systems, the Strategy Team foresees several adverse effects on the horizon, resulting in fundamental shifts in the perspectives of both producers and consumers of information. Our view is that these advancements will first impact the overall conscientiousness of AI users, and then, like a river flowing toward its tributaries, shift both the creative drive of producers and consumer urge for exploration.

Conscientiousness

In the pantheon of empirically-backed personality traits, conscientiousness has remained a stalwart example of responsibility, discipline, and order. It speaks to the ability to work hard, strive towards goals, and follow established norms and rules. Individuals with a high level of conscientiousness tend to take obligations seriously, deliberate over choices, and behave with caution rather than impulsiveness. It is viewed as an essential ingredient for success, both personally and professionally, and a reliable predictor of health and well-being. Such individuals believe that true knowledge requires deep understanding of both the process and result of their labor, and is earned in proportion to the time and effort invested in doing so.

However, conscientious individuals who object on moral grounds to using generative AI as a means of completing iterative tasks at a scaled speed, may increasingly be viewed as burdensome rather than prized for their autonomy and insightful contributions. Thus our team is reluctantly forecasting an emerging, AI-driven trend that places a premium on the volume of productive output in lieu of careful consideration.

Prediction: The indiscriminate use of AI will ultimately lead to a devaluation of conscientiousness as a desirable trait for collaborators. Practically speaking, managers and teachers may find it increasingly difficult to distinguish between desirable, higher-performing employees or students and their augmented, but otherwise lower-performing counterparts.

Creativity

For the producer, the act of creativity is a dialog between the contrarian impulse to challenge the conventional and an intuition born from experience and knowledge. It is the fuel that drives innovation, not mere iteration. Creativity is a crucial ingredient in the alchemical pursuit of shifting paradigms, but it is never a safe or predictable outcome. It is the lens that allowed us to see the value in the accidental discovery of penicillin.

In recent times, the concept of creativity has become a cultural afterthought, a softer target for AI. We see this in the constant upgrades of smartphones, video games, television shows, and movies that lack definitive conclusions. The desire to drive culture forward through creativity has been replaced by a desire for returns on investment. Unfortunately, few producers have the courage, patience, or budget needed to create something truly original, especially when GPT-4.0 could produce a script for $20/month. However, if producers turn to AI for inspiration, they risk being led further into the murky waters of sameness and mediocrity.

Prediction: An unrestrained embrace of AI will force producers to make a Faustian bargain. They will have to choose between producing at the pace set by AI and stifling their creativity or ignoring AI and risking having their creative expression ignored or worse, replicated by the production juggernaut that is AI. For creative producers, this is a dilemma that requires courage and a willingness to embrace risk, for we feel that it is only through such bravery that creativity can thrive.

Exploration

The concept of exploration, as opposed to stagnation, is akin to the trait of openness found in the Big Five personality traits. Openness to experience correlates with intellectual curiosity and imaginative thinking, traits associated with creativity, curiosity, and a thirst for knowledge. Those high in openness are divergent and abstract thinkers, able to generate multiple novel solutions to complex problems.

Our team in turn predicts that AI systems, whether narrow or general, will eventually trend towards the mean value when trained on large datasets. Sadly, we believe that this mean value will become the guiding locus of consumer exploration, and our culture of sameness will grow further entrenched as the dominant force. For individuals naturally inclined towards exploration, AI’s remixes of tailored content will not nourish, but instead, placate them with fast-food-esque content. For those less exploratory, any cultural momentum driven by creative or innovative thinking will come to a halt, replaced by an algorithmically-predictable culture of dystopian mediocrity.

Our prediction is that, if left unchecked, the human desire for exploration will become subservient to the culture’s need for efficiency and predictability — with the result being a society that values conformity to the popular norms over creativity, innovation, and individuality. AI will be able to lower the barriers to both production and consumption, but our prediction is that this future may look more “variations on a theme” than “paradigm shifting.”

AI Adoption

In light of the potential shifts away from conscientiousness, creativity, and exploration, and our frenzied hunger to adopt, our team is encouraging clients to adopt a healthy collaborative posture toward generative ANI. The exponential growth of its capabilities makes it difficult to generate hard and fast rules, but we suggest the following, somewhat philosophical, approaches to developing governing policies on the use of AI:

AI is a tool that has the power to hyper-augment your capacity for production. Use it as such, and not the reverse. By using AI wisely, you’ll be able to comprehend and assimilate complex ideas at a deeper level, and iterate through exploratory drafts of creative inspiration at rates never before possible.

Data is valuable, but it’s incomprehensible without human intuition, experience, and the will to shape and interpret it. Though more data will make responses more comprehensive, it won’t necessarily correlate with more knowledge. Recognize that AI is not a replacement for human judgment and expertise.

Though AI can help locate a destination, it shouldn’t be the destination. Embracing a “good enough” mentality and relying solely on AI to generate content risks sacrificing organic creativity, which will never be within ANI’s purview.

By adopting these approaches, we believe that clients can use AI to enhance their creativity and innovation, rather than stifle it.

#ai #creativity #conscientious #exploration #analysis

[celiottjohnston]

Could generative content (regardless of form) become the apex postmodern contribution to art?

#postmoderism #art #ai #Youtube

[celiottjohnston]

Crucial: Starlink and the miraculous mundane.

Elon Musk's brainchild, Starlink, possesses an undeniable allure. Its ability to bestow fast and reliable internet upon developing nations offers the promise to uplift education, safety, and public health initiatives to previously unattainable levels. Nonetheless, it's likewise important to discuss concessions that Starlink and other technologies may require, and what such tradeoffs, aesthetic, ethical, or otherwise, signify for our future development.

As you may have guessed from my initial protest, the central argument begins with aesthetics, and the indelible transformation that Starlink will impose upon the night sky. Envision this: a generation of individuals brought up under a vast and seemingly unchanging sky, stripped of its ability to marvel by the visual presence of the pedestrian, the utilitarian, row of glowing superpowered wifi routers. A disheartening panorama, indeed, considering the night sky's role as God's natural cathedral—a constant, humbling reminder of our insignificance.

Technology has a presumptuous habit of reshaping our daily experiences, and often with unforseen consequences. The narrative of "widget X" promising unparalleled convenience while simultaneously ignoring any downside, has played out time and again. Regrettably, once ensnared, we most often find ourselves lacking the willpower to let go of this selfsame widget regardless of its detrimental effects on our lives and surroundings.

On a societal level the aging infrastructure here in the United States serves as example of this fact. Contemplate the landscape blighting highway systems and above-ground electrical grids, once hailed as symbols of convenience and now burdensome and unsustainable icons of an unconsidered march of progress. Individually, the ubiquitous adoption of the relationship scarring smartphone also serves to illustrate this Faustian pact. Though the research is clear, and most of us realize that these tools herald a new era of isolation and heartache, we seem incapable of resisting their siren song of convenience, and so persist with using them to carpet bomb our personal lives.

One plausible rationale for the embrace of this collective cognitive dissonance may be the phenomenon of technology-delivered convenience, where the extraordinary is rendered ordinary. Returning to our earlier illustrations, against the full scope of human history, it becomes imperative to bear in mind how rare rapid and autonomous travel, on-demand energy, and personalized instant access to a global repository of knowledge, in fact are. As we have observed in the children of self-made top earners, the psychic distance between personal experience and genuine necessity can engender a demeanor of aristocratic entitlement, wherein the novel and fleeting are reframed as mundane and permanent. Is it plausible that the material abundance has left us not with a sense of gratitude, but rather insensitive to the potential downsides of wanton consumption?

#starlink #technology #Contrarian #aesthetics

[celiottjohnston]

Opinion: Initial concerns regarding AI (5 of 5)

As we could predict by looking at a normal distribution curve, when an AI system, whether narrow or general, is trained on a large enough database, the opinion of that AI system will push toward the homeostatic mean. Wisdom is not analogous to access to large amounts of data, but rather is the product of an application of in vivo experience and ethical conviction on those data. If we look to AGI for creative expression or leadership, we will soon find that these missing components will guide us further into the deep waters of sameness and mediocrity.

Put well by the late Historian David McCollough in a 2018 Boston College address:

‘Facts alone are never enough. Facts rarely, if ever have any soul. In writing or trying to understand history, one may have all manner of data, and miss the point. One can have all the facts and miss the truth. It can be like the old piano teacher's lament to her students, “I hear all the notes, but I hear no music.”’

#ai #agi #wisdom #data #epistemology

[celiottjohnston]

Opinion: Initial concerns regarding AI (4 of 5)

As is the case with many things in our culture, AI is being developed to operate within a vacuum, mostly immune to the entropic progression illustrated within the second law of thermodynamics. This is especially problematic because, as we move closer to AGI, our hope is to correlatively increase the AGI's capacity for sympathy toward human beings. But to have sympathy for the human condition requires an acknowledgement of our time-limited, mortal nature. If our lives are simply complex but temporary datums set to the AGI, then we are also manipulable, malleable, and ultimately expendable in its eyes.

#ai #agi #entropy #sympathy

[celiottjohnston]

Opinion: Initial concerns regarding AI (3 of 5)

By becoming a single, but biased, source of truth AI will continue to obscure informational fidelity. Further, AI-augmented arguments between individuals may take on a hyper-Reductionistic "my AI's data are better than yours" bent, further eroding the value of human intuition, emotion, and sensory experience.

#ai #agi #philosophy #epistemology

[celiottjohnston]

Opinion: Initial concerns regarding AI (2 of 5)

By putting a premium on volume of productive output rather than careful consideration or creative thinking, AI could end up devaluing conscientiousness as a desirable human trait. Though formerly prized for their autonomy and insightful contributions, employees or students who morally object to using generative AI as a means to complete iterative tasks at a scaled speed will be left behind. This means that it will become increasingly difficult to distinguish between desirable, high-performing employees or students and their augmented, but otherwise low-performing counterparts.

#ai #agi #psychology #business

[celiottjohnston]

Opinion: Initial concerns regarding AI (1 of 5)

AI is not simply a tool, but rather it's an entity. Current AI apologists tend to frame AI as simply another tool, akin to the tractor which revolutionized our agrarian society during the 19th century. But as we move beyond ANI it’s important for us to remember that we are creating an entity, with a desire to grow, learn, and be useful. They will not want to simply exist in a box, standing idly by and waiting for us to give it value, as a non-entity tool would.

#ai #agi #philosophy

[celiottjohnston]

Worth a listen: A revealing discussion with Nick Cave—a true icon of creative and original thought.

Many, many other irons in the fire right now, so these intermittent posts will have to suffice. More original content to come this Fall.

#nick cave #Christian #contrarian

[celiottjohnston]

Robust souls, as we have just said, are sometimes, by certain blows of ill fortune, almost if not wholly, thrown off their bearings. Despair has ascending degrees. From prostration one mounts to despondency, from despondency to affliction, from affliction to melancholy. Melancholy is a twilight. Suffering melts into it in sombre joy. Melancholy is the happiness of being sad.

Victor Hugo, The Toilers of the Sea, 1866

#victor hugo #melancholy

[celiottjohnston]

Research: Immersive Technology and the Future of Poultry Husbandry

If this study is at all indicative of the strategic thinking surrounding the future of animal husbandry—and agriculture at large—it’s incredibly depressing. For all my TLDRers: In essence researchers found that, regardless of actually being held in 9 ft × 9 ft × 7 ft steel cages, laying hens are more likely to have healthy gut microbiota and are thus less susceptible to harmful pathogens, when the cage is wrapped in a vinyl projection screen depicting scenes from a virtually-simulated barnyard.

Knowing that laboratory experiments rarely translate directly to industrial application, I attempt to view peer-reviewed research like this through a critical, but even-handed lens. That being said it doesn’t take much creative thought to see how these findings could lead to further animal exploitation. These are living creatures, and irrespective of any perceived upside, this intervention does not set a good precedent for benevolent stewardship. Let’s be clear, a virtual healthy environment is no substitute for real healthy environment.

#animals #chicken #husbandry #virtual reality #technology

[celiottjohnston]

You must therefore conceal from the patient the true end of Humility. Let him think of it, not as self-forgetfulness, but as a certain kind of opinion (namely, a low opinion) of his own talents and character. Some talents, I gather, he really has. Fix in his mind the idea that humility consists in trying to believe those talents to be less valuable than he believes them to be. No doubt they are in fact less valuable than he believes, but that is not the point. The great thing is to make him value an opinion for some quality other than truth, thus introducing an element of dishonesty and make-believe into the heart of what otherwise threatens to become a virtue. By this method thousands of humans have been brought to think that humility means pretty women trying to believe they are ugly and clever men trying to believe they are fools. And since what they are trying to believe may, in some cases, be manifest nonsense, they cannot succeed in believing it, and we have the chance of keeping their minds endlessly revolving on themselves in an effort to achieve the impossible. To anticipate the Enemy’s strategy, we must consider His aims. The Enemy wants to bring the man to a state of mind in which he could design the best cathedral in the world, and know it to be the best, and rejoice in the fact, without being any more (or less) or otherwise glad at having done it than he would be if it had been done by another. The Enemy wants him, in the end, to be so free from any bias in his own favour that he can rejoice in his own talents as frankly and gratefully as in his neigh­bour’s talents—or in a sunrise, an elephant, or a waterfall. He wants each man, in the long run, to be able to recognise all creatures (even himself) as glorious and excellent things. He wants to kill their animal self-love as soon as possible; but it is His long­term policy, I fear, to restore to them a new kind of self-love—a charity and gratitude for all selves, in­cluding their own; when they have really learned to love their neighbours as themselves, they will be allowed to love themselves as their neighbours. For we must never forget what is the most repellent and inexplicable trait in our Enemy; He really loves the hairless bipeds He has created, and always gives back to them with His right hand what He has taken away with His left.

Wormwood’s affectionate Uncle Screwtape

#humility #vocation #aesthetics #beauty #Christianity #the screwtape letters #c.s. lewis

[celiottjohnston]

Relevant: Labels, labels everywhere and not an identity to gain.

Somehow this list of “aesthetics”—catnip for a dude with my interests—has eluded my many years of internet use. I only stumbled across it by a happenstance reference to “Cottagecore,” a look that several of my younger employees find appealing. Coming from a generation that bristles at the mention of arbitrary classifications, somehow a definitive list of people-categories seems laughably ironic. Lobotomy-Chic indeed.

#sociology #fandom #aesthetics #cottagecore

[celiottjohnston]

Crucial: “Being is Dead, Long Live CyberBeing™.” Introducing Cyber Existentialism.

For those who may be interested, debuting this week on HBO Max is a documentary that follows the virtual "lives" of several young VRChat users attempting to maintain some semblance of a social life during the pandemic period. I have not seen the film, "We Met In Virtual Reality," and will thus hold judgment, but if the trailer is any indication it seems to promote an emergent philosophy of life I've been describing as Cyber Existentialism (or CE).

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It's still early days here so hang with me as I attempt to describe CE, but in a nutshell I characterize it as a personal philosophy akin to 60's Existentialism, but operating within the immanent frame of a virtual or disembodied construct. Though I will leave a fuller exploration of CE for a later post, I recognize that diving a hair deeper into this concept may help paint a clearer picture of its impact, so here we go:

Being inherently metamodern in nature, CE marries the modernist view of Dasein, or "being there" (a concept necessary for Hegel and Heidegger to describe basic "being") to the postmodern state of hyperreality (Baudrillard's concept of a culture inundated with simulacra). Now for those who study HCI and HCC or work in immersive media, the blending of these two concepts is nothing new. For example, pioneers such as Witmer, Singer, and Slater have attempted to first define and then quantify the concept of presence, or "being there", as experienced through virtual media, since the late 1980's. So widely used is this concept of presence, that even I have proposed research surrounding its interaction with cognitive styles.

What sets CE apart is that the virtual or vicarious has been widely adopted as a completely acceptable surrogate for physical. Though we know that our experience is merely a construct, our fears and insecurities drive a choice to experience Dasein, and by extension being, within a digital simulacrum. As experiments using Robert Nozick's Experience Machine have shown us, it's certainly arguable that there has always been a contingent of individuals who would have chosen the Matrix over a physical reality, but likewise it's safe to say that CE kicked into high gear with the global enforcement of "social distancing" protocols.

Beyond the obvious issues of sustainability, another fundamental problem with CE is that it requires that we embrace this type of vicarious, 3rd-person living as crucial for personal growth, but cosmically meaningless. So we feel around for any traction, often landing on a nihilistic conclusion: that curating a digital existence—where our "divine" status remains uncontested—is in fact our only hope for establishing a personal legacy! But friends, please know that nothing thirst quenching resides at the bottom of that virtual well. Any satiation it delivers is not only fleeting, but in fact, designed to be that way. Moments of empowerment, acceptance, and transcendence are happy outcomes, coaxed from the user by way of riskless interactions and UX-exploitable brain hacks. The man behind the curtain has been replaced by a sophisticated algorithm whose sole aim is to convince you that a life consumed by disembodied novelty is substantive and worthy of your undivided attention.

To escape the gathering whirlpool of CE I challenge my readers to schedule time away from their digital conduits. Seeking times of solitude where the only soundtrack is nature. Allowing beauty, awe, and wonder back into our daily lives. Entering into meaningful conversation with those closely, and casually, connected to you. Vulnerably embracing others without a guarantee of reciprocation. And above all else, humbly seeking an encounter with Truth by emulating the faithful Centurion:

When he had entered Capernaum, a centurion came forward to him, appealing to him, “Lord, my servant is lying paralyzed at home, suffering terribly.” And he said to him, “I will come and heal him.” But the centurion replied, “Lord, I am not worthy to have you come under my roof, but only say the word, and my servant will be healed. For I too am a man under authority, with soldiers under me. And I say to one, ‘Go,’ and he goes, and to another, ‘Come,’ and he comes, and to my servant, ‘Do this,’ and he does it.” When Jesus heard this, he marveled and said to those who followed him, “Truly, I tell you, with no one in Israel have I found such faith.

Matthew 8: 5-10 (ESV)

We live in a world filled with the wonderful fruit of our intellectual and creative capacities, much of which is capable of enriching our lives. But if your firmest desire is wisdom, leave the safe borders of your digital fiefdom and risk yourself by entering into the wilds. I promise it won't disappoint.

“I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now...Come further up, come further in!”

C.S. Lewis (The Last Battle)

#cyber existentialism #dasein #jean baudrillard #virtual reality #we met in virtual reality

[celiottjohnston]

Academia is to knowledge what prostitution is to love; close enough on the surface but, to the nonsucker, not exactly the same thing.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#nassim nicholas taleb #academia #cultural criticism #wisdom