Fragments

Fun collage from last night, from two '90s issues of Wired and a Marine Layer catalogue that no one who lives in my house requested. Under the knife it goes!

In which the authors create a neural network inside of Age of Empires... A nice counterpoint to the relentless anthropomorphizing of AI.

Our goal is not to argue in favour or against the existence of these attributes, but to point out that these conclusions could be incorrect. For this we build and train a simple neural network on the videogame Age of Empires II, and note that any entity in a sufficiently-powerful substrate, such as LEGO or the Greater Boston Area, could also present such attributes.

These myopic fools will kill us all so a handful of them can either live forever or enjoy the apocalypse as entertainment.

 The details of the dream don’t actually make much of a difference. Because they all take us roughly to the same place. What matters now is whether the masters of the universe – invested in harnessing the energy of the stars, tempted by a moral calculus that posits that the wellbeing of the people of the present is of inferior value to the vastly more numerous humanoids of the future – will have the patience to care for the rest of us.
 The signs are not great. Silicon Valley venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, for instance, wants to “ensure the techno-capital upward spiral continues forever”. His list of enemies encompasses pretty much any person or idea that might stand against technological endeavor. That includes “sustainability”, “social responsibility” and “tech ethics”.

www.theguardian.com

Our tech overlords are planning for conscious AI to conquer the cosmos. What could go wrong? | Eduardo Porter

A new belief set is uniting some of the wealthiest men in the world around a ‘transhuman’ future – actual humanity be damned

All from the September 2, 1940 issue of Life, and various other sources.

What?

How to Be Lazy

Summer corn

In these long winter days free from employment obligations, I've been playing with incorporating text into collage. When I found a four-page paper advertisement in a 1996 Wired, printed on beautiful stock, focused on flowers and bright colors, I remembered the dried rose petals I had collected from the bush in front of our house, and incorporated those as well.

This diptych uses the negative space from the cut out roses from one part of the ad. It's a little busy with the text, but I still like it.

And this one, a little simpler... I mixed some broken rose petals into my adhesive, and then wound up spreading it around wantonly. I don't hate the effect. And the text, partly from an article on MUDs, I think is fun.