HeyJaredContingent Thoughts
Contingent Thoughts is just what it says: ideas set down in a specific context, a particular juncture, that may prove wrong or evolve. My main subject is culture and technology. My approach is historical and personal.
- Indexed issues, last 90 days
- 10
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- Sep 14, 2026
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- Jul 22, 2026
Latest issues
It Is the Technology (opens the original)
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We keep seeing attempts to separate AI (and its infrastructure) from the people who produce, champion and use it. I am particularly bothered by attempts to keep its effects from reflecting back onto it, or distancing it from the consequences through hype, polemics, and narrow views that make tunnel vision look panoramic.This is typical of technology as a whole. The machines, drugs, and materials are normally segregated from outcomes, harms, and side-effects by these means. Somehow, the user is u
Misunderstandings (opens the original)
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This is not what I planned to write about today. I do not believe we are about to see either Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) or Artificial Superior Intelligence (ASI) appear anytime soon, nor do I believe the Technological Singularity makes sense - I had intended to write about that, but what I saw online this morning changed my direction. (I am not alone in that, and some of them are highly qualified to speak on the possibilities latent in current types of AI. I do have the historical bac
Perils of Techno-politics in a Time of Little Imagination (opens the original)
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Technology really has become politics, but it is not just social media, surveillance, crypto, or AI. It is energy (which has been a big part of it since the Second Industrial Revolution), biotech, space, and much more. Nor is it a single aspect. There may be many ways in which it has taken over. I write this on the 60th anniversary of the premier of Star Trek. While the series always had a pro-human approach to technology, it also presented our technological future as inevitable and utopian. Whe
Artificial States (opens the original)
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By the end of the twentieth century, liberal democracy was being replaced both by a return to autocracy: a great reversion in the affairs of humankind, and by the less clearly seen rise of automatocracy, rule by automation, government by machine-driven computation, prediction, and persuasion. The corporations that owned those machines began to subsume the state. By the early decades of the twenty-first century, a successor to the liberal nation-state had begun to emerge, a new, fantastical form
War is a thing unto itself (opens the original)
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There is only one war. It has been going on for more than a hundred years, maybe for centuries, possibly forever. War does not end with a truce or a peace treaty. It lives in hearts and minds, it breeds, it multiplies. It is always latent. In a way humans are nothing more than vectors, carriers. The most dangerous are those who are the least aware and think they are in control, lucky, favored by a god, or believe they have found something worth killing for.The kind of patriotism that fuels war i
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