Using the VSM, we look at the reasons authoritarianism is not viable (with some specific focus on the US). This analysis also hints at strategies for inducing the collapse of authoritarian systems. It's part of a larger text I've been working on.

Feedback, corrections (grammar, typos), and questions all welcome.

This project measures the human time required to deliver decent living standards through democratic economic planning. It reports weekly hours per 1,000 residents across core sectors (food, housing, utilities, care, mobility, industrial staples, culture, governance) under low/medium/high automation, then aggregates to total hours suggesting a ~10-hour social workweek at fixed quality and ecological ceilings

What is AI? A dominant view describes it as the quest “to solve intelligence”—a solution supposedly to be found in the secret logic of the mind, such as in its complex neural networks. Matteo Pasquinelli argues, to the contrary, that the inner code of AI is shaped not by the imitation of biological intelligence, but the intelligence of labour and social relations. Here he is interviewed by Richard Hames, audio producer at Novara Media.

There is a part where he critiques "vitalism in cybernetics"

This story is profoundly ironic: America rejected cybernetics but implemented the cybernetic vision, while the Soviet Union did just the opposite: it paid lip service to cybernetics and stalled practical cybernetic projects. The cybernetics scare both focused the attention of U.S. science administrators on human-machine interaction and made explicit cybernetic references ideologically suspect. As a result, Americans pursued a narrowly defined but viable technical project, while the Soviets aimed at a utopian grand reform. This teaches us something about the power of discourse: it resides not so much in overt declarations but in subtle metaphors that change our mode of thinking and ultimately reshape our world. ≈

When reading some of Stanislaw Lem’s stories as a young adult, I first stumbled across the word ‘cyberneticists’ - basically denoting a tech wizard in the eyes of my younger self. Ever since reading Andrew Pickering’s The Cybernetic Brain - Sketches for another Future I think that this early impression was basically justified. In many ways cybernetics is the less successful but actually more brilliant twin of the poster child discipline of artificial intelligence (AI). Here I will explore why cybernetics was in many ways superior to AI, why it can still teach us a few important insights about the mind, and why cybernetics is relevant to the question of whether intelligent machines are dangerous for their creators.