UNCLASSIFIED: Ambient Inventions
Category: marks
The Sleeping Forecast: Hunker down and drift away
American statisticians released the results of a survey. Buried in the data is a trend with implications for trillions of dollars of spending. Researchers at the Census Bureau ask firms if they have used artificial intelligence “in producing goods and services” in the past two weeks. Recently, we estimate, the employment-weighted share of Americans using AI at work has fallen by a percentage point, and now sits at 11% (see chart 1). Adoption has fallen sharply at the largest businesses, those employing over 250 people. Three years into the generative-AI wave, demand for the technology looks surprisingly flimsy.Comments closed
In a world obsessed with likes and followers, people are increasingly choosing mystery – keeping secrets and making you work to get them.
(poor music choice)
Comments closedNot sure if embeds for IG work yet!
Alice Diop colors in the blind spots of art history with this thoughtful short starring Kayije Kagame (Saint Omer). Countering clichés and absences in Black portraiture with the joys of real life, Fragments for Venus leaves behind Old Masters to widen the frame on where we find aesthetic pleasure.Comments closed
Late Junction: Warped laments, serpentine hums
Verity Sharp presents another round of experimental listening taking in the unusual and exhilarating from around the globe. There’s chastening, contorted, laments from Peru’s Alejandra Cardenas (Ale Hop) as she delves into the trauma not only of her own life but that of her homeland – charting colonialism, cultural turbulence and addiction with a steely gaze. Plus an inquisitive and emotionally immediate return from Japanese experimenter Phew, paired this time with American multimedia artist Danielle de Picciotto, the duo melding their singular voices into sparse yet tense collages. Berlinde Deman meanwhile offers droning reflections on the Serpent, a unique wind instrument enhanced with effects pedals and her unique vocal stylings; and Will Glaser presents a bewildering collection of ‘Ethnographic Recordings From An Imagined Future’.
SS Rajamouli Announces “VARANASI,” a Globe-Trotting IMAX Adventure — Two 3-Hour Movies Set for 2027 Release
Mark Elder conducts the London Philharmonic Choir and Orchestra in a sea-themed concert as part of the orchestra’s Harmony with Nature season. Sibelius’s powerful depiction of the ocean waves in his Oceanides is paired with Vaughan Williams’s mighty first symphony, the Sea Symphony with soloists Masabane Cecilia Rangwanasha and David Stout.
After testing three different toys powered by AI, researchers from the US Public Interest Research Group found that the playthings can easily verge into risky conversational territory for children, including telling them where to find knives in a kitchen and how to start a fire with matches. One of the AI toys even engaged in explicit discussions, offering extensive advice on sex positions and fetishes.
COPENHAGEN, Nov 12 (Reuters) – Iceland has designated the potential collapse of a major Atlantic Ocean current system a national security concern and an existential threat, enabling its government to strategize for worst-case scenarios, the country’s climate minister told Reuters.Comments closed
Comments closedMany climate scientists call our current epoch the “Anthropocene” — the first human-driven climate era. Many technologists call it the “Information Age” or now the “Artificial Intelligence Age.” Some strategists prefer to call it “the Return of Geopolitics” or, as the historian Robert Kagan put it, “the Jungle Grows Back.”
But none of these labels capture the full fusion taking place between accelerating climate change and rapid transformations in technology, biology, cognition, connectivity, material science, geopolitics and geoeconomics. They have set off an explosion of all sorts of things combining with all sorts of other things — so much so that everywhere you turn these days binary systems seem be giving way to poly ones. Artificial intelligence is hurtling toward “polymathic artificial general intelligence,” climate change is cascading into “poly-crisis,” geopolitics is evolving into “polycentric” and “polyamorous” alignments, once-binary trade is dispersing into “poly-economic” supply webs, and our societies are diversifying into ever more “polymorphic” mosaics.
As a foreign affairs columnist, I now have to track the impact and interactions of not only superpowers, but also super-intelligent machines, super-empowered individuals taking advantage of technology to extend their reach and super-global corporations,as well as super-storms and super-failing states, like Libya and Sudan.
I was musing about all this one day with Craig Mundie, the former head of research and strategy at Microsoft. I told him that in nearly every domain I was writing about lately, the old binary left-right systems were giving way to multiple interconnected ones, and, in the process, shattering the coherence of both the Cold War and post-Cold War paradigms.
At one point Mundie said to me, “I know what you should call this new era: the Polycene.”
Thousands of songs representing some of the rarest and most uniquely American music borne from the Jazz Age and the Great Depression would have likely been lost to landfills and faded from memory. Fans and historians have long credited obsessive record collectors for preserving much of that music, and today they can thank a new partnership between UC Santa Barbara and the nonprofit Dust-to-Digital Foundation for making it available to the public for free.
UCSB Library’s Special Research Collections has been uploading music from the foundation’s trove of approximately 50,000 songs to the university’s Discography of American Historical Recordings (DAHR) database. So far, more than 5,000 songs from Dust-to-Digital have been added to DAHR, said David Seubert, curator of the library’s performing arts collection. “Thousands more are in the pipeline,” he noted.
“The Dust-to-Digital Foundation has digitized some of the most significant private collections in the country,” Seubert added. “We are pleased to partner with them to make this rare content accessible.”
https://www.inclementweather.xyz
The school for inclement weather is a 365-acre refuge and radical observatory set on the banks of an atmospheric river, just above the thermal belt in Kashia Pomo territory in Northern California.
We practice disaster companionship – systems of knowledge and care that emerge from weathering the earth (and each other) amidst planetary demise. Our work asks: as the earth mutates, how must we mutate in return?
A weirdly sparkly cover of one of my favourite Xmas songs:
Comments closedIn a recent paper published in the Journal of Holography Applications in Physics, University of British Columbia Okanagan adjunct professor Mir Faizal and colleagues say they’ve proven that the fundamental nature of reality simply cannot be simulated on any computer.
By using mathematical theorems, they argued that some truths can only be understood through non-algorithmic understanding.
From ARMAGEDDON GOSPELS (2019)
We’re racing towards a future in which devices will be able to read our thoughts.
You see signs of it everywhere, from brain-computer interfaces to algorithms that detect emotions from facial scans. And though the tech remains imperfect, it’s getting closer all the time: now a team of scientists say they’ve developed a model that can generate descriptions of what people’s brains are seeing by simply analyzing a scan of their brain activity.
They’re calling the technique “mind captioning,” and it may represent an effective way for transcribing what someone’s thinking, with impressively comprehensive and accurate results.
One from 2010 today:
Also, GOD DESTROYER, Osvor, 2011: