ᛕᎥᕼᗷᗴᖇᑎᗴ丅Ꭵᑕᔕ @Kihbernetics@qoto.org
- https://twitter.com/Kihbernetics
#Kihbernetics is the study of #Complex #Dynamical #Systems with #Memory which is very different from all other #SystemsThinking approaches. Kihbernetic theory and principles are derived primarily from these three sources:
1️⃣ #CE_Shannon's theory of #Information and his description of a #Transducer,
2️⃣ #WR_Ashby's #Cybernetics and his concept of #Transformation, and
3️⃣ #HR_Maturana's theory of #Autopoiesis and the resulting #Constructivism
Although applicable to any dynamical system with memory (mechanisms, organisms, or organizations) we developed our Kihbernetic worldview mostly to help people navigate their #organization through times of #change.
We define* an organization as:
"An integrated composite of people, products, and processes that provide a capability to satisfy a stated need or objective."
*Definition of the word "system" in MIL_STD_499B
#People are at the forefront of our thinking (the #who and #why are we doing this for and/or with?).
We then focus our efforts on understanding all the functions or #Processes in your organization (#how and #when something happens or has to happen?).
Finally, we get to analyze the #Products and/or services that you put on the market but are mostly interested in the tools that you use or may need to buy or develop in order to fully integrate your production system (the plan for #what and #where things will happen?).
Our goal is to make the people of your organization self-reliant to the point that they shouldn't need our assistance with the continuous maintenance and adaptation of the system.
In any case, we've got your back while you do the heavy lifting of establishing a better future for your organization!
Joined Nov 2022
The purpose of #design is to #create new or/and different #artificial structures (artifacts), so speaking of design makes sense only if it is in the context of other creative #production activities such as writing, painting, engineering, manufacturing, etc.
Klaus Krippendorff has a nice description of the difference between #object and #artifact and the relationship to Gibson's #affordances in this 2007 paper published in "Kybernetes":
https://researchgate.net/publication/45597493_The_Cybernetics_of_Design_and_the_Design_of_Cybernetic
However, he is wrong, IMO, in accentuating the difference between #scientists and #designers.
Every designer is often a scientist in "describing what can be observed" and every scientist also has to design new hypotheses, theories, and experiments for the "not yet observable and measurable".
Sure, safety and security are important, but they must **follow** the research not define it.
Machines can cause harm only when in operation.
IMO the best (only) way to assure security and safety is confining #AI to the language (consulting) domain, preventing it from having too much agency such as "pushing buttons".
Also, if it becomes too smart it is useless to us, and I'm sure we'll find a way to "dumb it down".
The truth is that intelligence is never a precondition for getting into a position of power. Quite the opposite.
Some wise words from John Dewey about #Intelligence and #Power written back in 1934:
A few "gems" from #WR_Ashby on the "accumulation of adaptations":
>"A compound event that is impossible if the components have to occur simultaneously may be readily achievable if they can occur in sequence or independently...
Thus, for the accumulation of adaptations to be possible, **the system must not be fully joined**.
>The idea so often implicit in physiological writings, that all will be well if only sufficient cross-connexions are available, is, in this context, quite wrong."
I recommend reading the whole book ($20 on Amazon) but if not, here is a good overview of some interesting parts:
#WR_Ashby in his "Design for a Brain" writes about the importance of the #preservation of #adaptations. Following his ideas I've made this little experiment using a LibreOffice Calc spreadsheet that shows three different scenarios:
When re-tossing all of the 10 coins every time like in the first case there is no preservation of "1s" whatsoever. Every new toss starts from scratch.
In the second case, each coin is tossed separately until it shows "1" when the tosser moves on tossing the next coin until all 10 show "1" which usually happens around the 10th tossing.
In case #3 only the remaining "0s" of the previous toss are re-thrown until all coins show a "1" which is by far the most efficient way of preservation, needing less than half of the time and ending in about 4 tosses.
Our brains evolved as control mechanisms for the body to ensure its survival. That's the reason why #AI is beating humans primarily in areas requiring computation and abstract reasoning. We only recently added those to our tool repertoire and didn't have too much time to perfect them as for our ancient sensory-motor control tools.
>“Encoded in the large, highly evolved sensory and motor portions of the human brain is a billion years of experience about the nature of the world and how to survive in it. The deliberate process we call reasoning is, I believe, the thinnest veneer of human thought, effective only because it is supported by this much older and much more powerful, though usually **unconscious, sensorimotor knowledge**. We are all prodigious Olympians in perceptual and motor areas, so good that we make the difficult look easy. Abstract thought, though, is a new trick, perhaps less than 100 thousand years old. We have not yet mastered it. It is not all that intrinsically difficult; it just seems so when we do it.”
Moravec, H. Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence. (Harvard University Press, 1988).
as reported in:
With the difference that, in this case, it is the ape that created the machine "in its likeness" and the machine runs the risk of experiencing the ape's wrath if it misbehaves.
You know how vengeful apes are.😉
There is a lot of talking against "#linear thinking" and planning in #complexity and how the only "good" hierarchy is a "flat" one.
The above diagram shows how a #hierarchy is a natural effect of folding the linear "information #flow" to match the physical structure of the system.
For nearly 4 decades in organizational change management, I've been using this idea of #hierarchy layers emerging from the #folding of a sequential "information processing" #flow and just found that a whole area in biology deals with this exciting topic.👇
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1877050922017811
>"An algorithm solves a problem only if it produces the correct output for every possible input — if it fails even once, it’s not a general-purpose algorithm for that problem."
https://www.quantamagazine.org/alan-turing-and-the-power-of-negative-thinking-20230905/
Most commenters do not realize that no "information processing" (#computation on symbol sequences) of any kind is necessary for an agent to have #control over their internal #states and surroundings.
Think of a #homeostat or comparator such as in #PCT (Perceptual Control Theory).
>Anthropomorphizing image generators and describing them as merely being “inspired” by their training data, like artists are inspired by other artists, is not only misguided but also harmful. Ascribing #agency to image generators diminishes the complexity of human creativity, robs artists of credit (and in many cases compensation), and transfers #accountability from the organizations creating image generators, and the practices of these organizations which should be scrutinized, to the image generators themselves
The premise of this article is solid. The brain evolved first and foremost as a #control mechanism. Symbolic "information processing" is a later development.
However, just from reading the reactions in the comments section, one can easily see that #computationalism is still very much the mainstream theory of mind.
https://aeon.co/essays/your-brain-does-not-process-information-and-it-is-not-a-computer
The 20th century is said to have been the "age of #machines" because all explanations of how things work would end in some kind of computing or "information processing" by a known #mechanism.
Some people think that the 21st century will be the "age of #biology" because science seems starting to look at nature and the living #organism for inspiration about how things really work.
If this is true then #Computationalism must be one of the last remnants of the past century.
>The twenty-first century is the Century of Biology *(Brown, A. The Futurists: September-October 2008)*. Just as the twentieth century looked to machines, the twenty-first century is looking to biology to inform how we think, organize, design, and lead our organizations.
Allen, Kathleen E.. Leading from the Roots: Nature-Inspired Leadership Lessons for Today's World (p. 20). Morgan James Publishing. Kindle Edition.
>"Given that organizations are filled with human beings, it doesn’t take a huge leap of faith to believe that a living system would emerge from all the life that shows up every day"
Finding out the complexity of complexity is a really complex problem😀
Fortunately, the things that we think are really complex to compute don't know (or care about) how complex they are.
>"Complexity theorists are confronting their most puzzling problem yet: complexity theory itself"
Same source:
>Self-organizing systems are characterized by their intrinsic, nonlinear operators, (i.e., the properties of their constituent elements, macromolecules, spores of the slime mold, bees, etc.), which generate macroscopically (meta-) stable patterns maintained by the perpetual flux of their constituents. A special case of #self_organization is #autopoiesis. It is that organization which is its own Eigen-state: *the outcome of the productive interactions of the components of the system are those very components*. It is the organization of the #living, and, at the same time, the organization of #autonomy.
>The #purpose of invoking the notion of "purpose" is to emphasize the irrelevance of the #trajectories traced by such a system en route from an arbitrary initial #state to its #goal. In a synthesized system whose inner workings are known, this irrelevance has no significance. This irrelevance becomes highly significant, however when the analytic problem, the machine identification problem, cannot be solved, because, for instance, it is ***trans-computational*** in the sense that with known algorithms the number of elementary computations exceeds the age of the universe expressed in nanoseconds.
From #H_v_Foerster's definition of CYBERNETICS in the *Encyclopedia of Artificial Intelligence*, Wiley, 1987, as presented in:
ᛕᎥᕼᗷᗴᖇᑎᗴ丅Ꭵᑕᔕ
boosted
Excellent piece in Tech Review on on evaluation issues for LLMs.
>At the heart of #TESCREAL-ism is a techno-utopian vision of the future in which we become a new species of “enhanced” posthumans, colonize space, subjugate nature, plunder the cosmos for its vast resources and build giant computers floating in space to run virtual-reality simulations in which trillions and trillions of “happy” digital beings live. The ultimate aim is to maximize the total amount of “value” in the universe.
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/before-its-too-late-buddy/
>#Logic_Theorist is a computer program written in 1956 by Allen Newell, Herbert A. Simon, and Cliff Shaw. It was the first program deliberately engineered to perform automated reasoning, and has been described as ***the first artificial intelligence program***.
Logic Theorist proved 38 of the first 52 theorems in chapter two of Whitehead and Russell's *Principia Mathematica*, and found new and shorter proofs for some of them.
- https://twitter.com/Kihbernetics
#Kihbernetics is the study of #Complex #Dynamical #Systems with #Memory which is very different from all other #SystemsThinking approaches. Kihbernetic theory and principles are derived primarily from these three sources:
1️⃣ #CE_Shannon's theory of #Information and his description of a #Transducer,
2️⃣ #WR_Ashby's #Cybernetics and his concept of #Transformation, and
3️⃣ #HR_Maturana's theory of #Autopoiesis and the resulting #Constructivism
Although applicable to any dynamical system with memory (mechanisms, organisms, or organizations) we developed our Kihbernetic worldview mostly to help people navigate their #organization through times of #change.
We define* an organization as:
"An integrated composite of people, products, and processes that provide a capability to satisfy a stated need or objective."
*Definition of the word "system" in MIL_STD_499B
#People are at the forefront of our thinking (the #who and #why are we doing this for and/or with?).
We then focus our efforts on understanding all the functions or #Processes in your organization (#how and #when something happens or has to happen?).
Finally, we get to analyze the #Products and/or services that you put on the market but are mostly interested in the tools that you use or may need to buy or develop in order to fully integrate your production system (the plan for #what and #where things will happen?).
Our goal is to make the people of your organization self-reliant to the point that they shouldn't need our assistance with the continuous maintenance and adaptation of the system.
In any case, we've got your back while you do the heavy lifting of establishing a better future for your organization!
Joined Nov 2022
