#techmology

[imathers]

Lavender, Military AI, and Technological Delegation

Earlier today, the Tel Aviv-based outlet +972 Magazine published a long exposé on “Lavender,” an artificial intelligence-based program that

The accuracy, efficiency, and fairness of these systems is not the point, and thus cracking open the black box will tell you very little about how they work. The true process is more straight-forwardly social: they operate through a process I think of as “technological delegation.” They work by mystifying questions of responsibility and agency behind a veil of technology, by subtly changing the subject. Uber did this by selling an unlicensed, unregulated taxi service as an “app.” Google did this when they used to blame the algorithm for search results. They’re machines for hiding behind, instruments of moral and legal arbitrage. As such, the normal forms of AI critique not only misapprehend the problem, but by focusing attention too tightly on technological politics, they actively help to deepen the illusion.

[blueorchidsims]

Thank you @dreambot and wifey @tigerellasims for peer pressuring helping me get photoshop, and for putting up with my newb level understanding of techmology.

[imathers]

Spiritualized: the story of the first four albums

Jason Pierce guides us through those first four groundbreaking Spiritualized albums

“We’d done two mixes for Pure Phase and I was unhappy with both,” Pierce recalls. “But then I was working with [mixer and multi-instrumentalist] John Coxon for the first time in London and he suggested that we run both mixes, one in one speaker and one in the other, and cut them up until they fit together. If they went too out of phase, you’d get a proper phase like a Hawkwind thing, which wasn’t what we were after. But once we’d done that, and played just 10 seconds of the two together, we just had to do it. So the Electric Mainline thing was just trying to encapsulate this sound that we’d stumbled upon.”

Best experienced on headphones, Pure Phase remains the most sonically perverse of Spiritualized’s records and re-emerges on remastered vinyl with its mostly white artwork newly reborn in bright green. One thing that Pierce has no interest in doing is remixing any of these albums, and with Pure Phase in particular, you can hardly blame him.

“I don’t believe in changing things for the sake of it,” he notes. “But it was an accidental find back then, to have the two mixes left and right. It means that you couldn’t reproduce it. If you had any kind of plan you couldn’t place the bass drum where it sits in that mix because it’s the product of two bass drums, one left and one right, and slightly out of phase with each other. So it doesn’t sit in the centre and it doesn’t sit on either side either! It was all predigital, so we couldn’t just lock the mixes together and let the whole thing run. We had to cut the tape up into six or eight bar sections, and relock them with every bass drum, every few bars, and then start again. It took forever, it took months, but it was beautiful, and the result was extraordinary.”

I knew none of this and I am fascinated.

[imathers]

A “Chinese Borges” wrote millions of words of fake Russian history on Wikipedia for a decade.

For over a decade, a Chinese woman known as “Zhemao” created a massive, fantastical, and largely fictional alternate history of late Medieval Russia on Chinese Wikipedia, writing millions of words …

Not only do I love this, but maybe the most Borgesian thing about it is that I strongly suspect me thinking about those thousands of words of fictions does a lot more for me than actually reading them would have.

[imathers]

A cryptocurrency’s energy cost is tied to its current price. This is because cryptocurrencies are designed to incentivize miners- if they were not tied together, the potential value return of a making a bitcoin could fall below the price of electricity required to make it.

Because of this, Bitcoin’s continued financial return depends on coins being harder to make in the future. The people who invest in cryptocurrencies- like any kind of futures speculation- are betting that it will be better to be holding this resource tomorrow than making it.

While I don’t believe that we have to live under physical scarcity, through a combination of bad economic policies and incredible wealth inequality, we do. No one who has watched the price of food staples go up in a crisis has to imagine how scarcity can affect the market.

However, in a digital context scarcity must be constructed- there is nothing that demands the next block in the blockchain be harder to make than the last. If anything, the opposite should be true- computers grow ever more efficient and powerful. This means any scarcity is artificial, a process that demands ever more energy, ever more resources lost to continue to operate and return, for no other reason than to insure that tomorrow it will be even more expensive- which makes the wastefulness of today a good investment.

This is why cryptocurrency is valuable. There is nothing high-tech about it. There is no miracle. It is simply futures speculation without the speculation- no guessing required, because we know it will be more wasteful tomorrow; it is baked into the tech.

All that cryptocurrency does is abstract resources into a market by making those resources unavailable to the future.

HERE IS THE ARTICLE YOU CAN SEND TO PEOPLE WHEN THEY SAY “BUT THE ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES WITH CRYPTOART WILL BE SOLVED SOON, RIGHT?”

[imathers]

So between the headache I started the day with and the seriously upset stomach (still a mystery, although I feel better now) I ended it with, yesterday sucked. Also, tumblr decided to eat up a few scheduled posts, both here and at @dustedmagazine, only to spit them out hours later, long after they were scheduled to go up. So I’ve set up posts today, and am crossing my fingers they work; but Anais and I also looked at what we had to do this week and all our vacation time and decided to take off work until Friday in order to clean the apartment. We’ve got an ambitious list to work through (and I have some other stuff to do that’s not on there), but I think we’ll manage. 

[imathers]

From twitter - I am having A Day today, unfortunately.

[imathers]

Black, Hot Ice May Be Nature’s Most Common Form of Water

A new experiment confirms the existence of “superionic ice,” a bizarre form of water that might comprise the bulk of giant icy planets throughout the universe.

This whole thing is pretty fascinating, but I want to highlight this bit:

Superionic ice can now claim the mantle of Ice XVIII. It’s a new crystal, but with a twist. All the previously known water ices are made of intact water molecules, each with one oxygen atom linked to two hydrogens. But superionic ice, the new measurements confirm, isn’t like that. It exists in a sort of surrealist limbo, part solid, part liquid. Individual water molecules break apart. The oxygen atoms form a cubic lattice, but the hydrogen atoms spill free, flowing like a liquid through the rigid cage of oxygens.

Experts say the discovery of superionic ice vindicates computer predictions, which could help material physicists craft future substances with bespoke properties. And finding the ice required ultrafast measurements and fine control of temperature and pressure, advancing experimental techniques. “All of this would not have been possible, say, five years ago,” said Christoph Salzmann at University College London, who discovered ices XIII, XIV and XV. “It will have a huge impact, for sure.”

Depending on whom you ask, superionic ice is either another addition to water’s already cluttered array of avatars or something even stranger. Because its water molecules break apart, said the physicist Livia Bove of France’s National Center for Scientific Research and Pierre and Marie Curie University, it’s not quite a new phase of water. “It’s really a new state of matter,” she said, “which is rather spectacular.”