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“The latest advances in cognitive computation are a move inexorably towards a shamanism of the machine, a magical phenomenology based on fanciful but effective latent structures that we lack either the capacity or the sensorium to interrogate.”
NOTE
Imagine entities existing with more captured knowledge and know how than myself. If it far exceeds me, how can I meaningfully engage or evaluate what they produce? What is that threshold where I can no longer know and must rely in trust and “magic”? Where all our experts are just outclassed in capacity.
Everyone on LinkedIn is an expert. I don’t use it, but I’d be encouraged to make a profile where I just degrade myself justly, point out all my flaws and where I am trying to improve and learn.
How do computational forms of vision allow us to see the unseen of human subjectivity and the lifeworld that emerges through and by means of such subjectivity?
Even now, different generations of humans effectively live in different worlds (Serres 2015), despite these worlds’ foundations in the same conditions of embodiment.
humans insert their subjectivity into computational outputs: if the computer “sees”, then users see what is already seen and was heretofore un-seeable to the naked human eye. The human comes to see itself through that which has already been seen by the computer.
On lossy compression:
Although continuous pigments are rendered a discontinuous pixel through this process, these image compression algorithms are designed so as to render the difference between the two nearly imperceptible, already flirting with the interstices of the seen and unseen.
Variation autoencoders:
The unseen emerges from the seen. Variational autoencoding neural networks use the latent structures within images in order to produce images that are latent within these structures – possible but not perceptible. In other words, variational autoencoders generate the otherwise unseen, with reference to the otherwise unstructured; they regularize and structure, rendering visible the seeable unseen and normalizing the otherwise discontinuous. As computers come to see the world on behalf of their users, the world of the seen merges with the world of the unseen: the overlapping umwelts of the computer and the human – one prosthetic and the other organic – merge.
Survey of Computer Expert As Wizard Archetype
a comprehensive definition of magic is not a necessary prerequisite to the study of magic.
Shift toward the unseen
When we, as users, interact with this unseen realm, we become less residents of the seeable world than residents of the unseen. We abandon, however reluctantly or unknowingly, the world of the physical subject – the world of direct human experience, wherein “that which appear”’ appears because it does so to us. In such abandonment, we become objectified subjects: subjects living in a world known through the lens of the computational object.