Ponderings
It's complicated
We already see hints of the endpoint toward which we seem to be hurtling: a world where nearly self-contained technological ecosystems operate outside of human knowledge and understanding. As a scientific paper in Nature in September 2013 put it, there is a complete 'machine ecology beyond human response time' in the financial world, where stocks are traded in an eyeblink, and mini-crashes and spikes can occur on the order of a second or less. When we try to push our financial trades to the limits of the speed of light, it is time to recognise that machines are interacting with each other in rich ways, essentially as algorithms trading among themselves, with humans on the sidelines.
It used to be taken for granted that there would be knowledge that no human could possibly attain. In his book The Guide for the Perplexed, the medieval scholar Moses Maimonides opined that 'man's intellect indubitably has a limit at which it stops' and even enumerated several concepts he thought we would never grasp, including 'the number of the stars of heaven' and 'whether that number is even or odd'. B ut then the Scientific Revolution happened, and with it, a triumphalism of understanding. H undreds of years later, we now know the exact number of objects in the night sky visible to the naked eye — it's 9,110 (an even number).
Aeon Magazine, 06 January 2014
Cybernetics
Weiner, Norbert (1948). Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine
... these two phenomena are closely related to each other, for the first is the basis for the adaptation of the individual to its environment by means of experience, which is what we may call ontogenetic learning, while the second, as it furnishes the material on which variation and natural selection may operate, is the basis of phylogenetic learning. As I have already mentioned, the mammals, in particular man, do a large part of their adjustment to their environment by ontogenetic learning, whereas the birds, with their highly varied patterns of behavior which are not learned in the life of the individual, have devoted themselves much more to phylogenetic learning. We have seen the importance of non-linear feedbacks in the origination of both processes.
The present chapter is devoted to the study of a specific self-organizing system in which nonlinear phenomena play a large part. What I here describe is what I believe to be happening in the self-organization of electroencephalograms or brain waves.
read Chapter 10, pp. 251-249
Economist
When the authors tested out prospective configuration in artificial neural networks they found that they learned in a much more human-like way—more robustly and with less training—than models trained with backprop. They also found that the network offered a much closer match for human behaviour on other very different tasks, such as one that involved learning how to move a joystick in response to different visual cues.
Something else
Ndakuvara
Oliver "Tuku" Mtukudzi (born 22 September 1952 in Highfield, Harare; died 23 January 2019) is an award-winning Zimbabwean musician, composer and guitarist. He is widely regarded as the most celebrated performer in the country's history. From the Wikipedia entry ...
With his husky voice, Mtukudzi became the most recognised voice to emerge from Zimbabwe and onto the international scene and he earned a devoted following across Africa and beyond. A member of Zimbabwe's KoreKore group, with Nzou Samanyanga as his totem, he sang in the nation's dominant Shona language along with Ndebele and English. He also incorporated elements of different musical traditions, giving his music a distinctive style, known to fans as Tuku Music ...
Prior to the independence of Zimbabwe, Mtukudzi's music depicted the struggles under Rhodesian white minority rule. In subsequent years following Zimbabwean independence, his music has advocated for tolerance and peace and has frequently portrayed the struggles of women and children.