Ponderings
The Unseen
We are at a critical juncture where the decisions we make or fail to make will affect the trajectory of AI and connective labour. On the one hand, we are living in an AI spring, a moment in which artificial intelligence is being deployed to solve problems we thought were intractable, such as how to conquer drug-resistant bacteria in hospitals, how to predict earthquakes, or how to decode the language of sperm whales, with sometimes magical results. AI has ushered in a new era of enormous possibility. But it cannot do everything, nor should we want it to. Yet AI is also being actively deployed as an alternative to human witnessing, in fields from therapy to teaching to medicine ...
... Yet there is something that critics of AI often overlook: the impact of AI on relationships, on the connections between people that are forged in emotional, interpersonal work, work like teaching, counselling or primary care.
Aeon Magazine, 05 October 2025
Cybernetics
Weiner, Norbert (1948). Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine
The statistical theories we have here developed involve a full knowledge of the pasts of the time series we observe. In every case, we have to be content with less, as our observation does not run indefinitely into the past. The development of our theory beyond this point, as a practical statistical theory, involves an extension of existing methods of sampling. The author and others have made a beginning in this direction. It involves all the complexities of the use either of Bayes' law, on the one hand, or of those terminological tricks in the theory of likelihood, on the other, which seem to avoid the necessity for the use of Bayes' law but which in reality transfer the responsibility for its use to the working statistician, or the person who ultimately employs his results. Meanwhile, the statistical theorist is quite honestly able to say that he has said nothing which is not perfectly rigorous and unimpeachable.
read Chapter 3, pp. 85-128
Economist
Schools brief | Artificial intelligence: A short history of AI
It was from one of those pockets of perseverance that today's boom was born. As the rudiments of the way in which brain cells—a type of neuron—work were pieced together in the 1940s, computer scientists began to wonder if machines could be wired up the same way. In a biological brain there are connections between neurons which allow activity in one to trigger or suppress activity in another; what one neuron does depends on what the other neurons connected to it are doing. A first attempt to model this in the lab (by Marvin Minsky, a Dartmouth attendee) used hardware to model networks of neurons. Since then, layers of interconnected neurons have been simulated in software.
Something else
Sergio Mendes & Brasil '66
The bandleader and musician, who died on (05 September 2024) at 83, was a bridge from Brazilian music to the world — and back. [New York Times]
Sergio Mendes & Brasil '66 was the lineup that would bring Mendes hits through the 1960s, with women's voices carried by breezy Brazilian rhythms. The band's international breakthrough featured the irresistible melody of the Ben Jor song “Mas Que Nada.” The song's lyrics, in Portuguese, praise the deep Afro-Brazilian tradition of samba. But Mendes's finger-snapping version, with Lani Hall's lead vocals, also uses thick, bluesy piano chords to add a touch of Nuyorican boogaloo. He remade the song repeatedly through the decades — all the way up to an EDM update this year — but his first one endures.top