Darwin Among the Machines
by George Dyson · 28 Mar 2012 · 463pp · 118,936 words
. Erewhon is Nowhere, Samuel Butler warned. There is no turning back the clock. Garet Garrett (1878–1954) published his pocket-sized but deeply cautionary book, Ouroboros; or, the Mechanical Extension of Mankind, in 1926. In the second chapter, titled “The Machine as If,” he noted that “Either the machine has a
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’s population was still concerned with producing food: “The new, non-agricultural half is the industrial part; it is the part that serves machines.”32 Ouroboros was a mythical serpent that swallowed its own tail, an embodied contradiction that must, according to logic, either grow ever larger on its miraculous diet
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mind, how to give their fecundity a law and their functions a rhythm, how not to employ them in error against himself.”35 Leviathan and Ouroboros were fellow mythological creatures: one whose power encompassed everything, the other that succeeded in swallowing itself. Technology has brought both
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Ouroboros and Leviathan to life. Is the diffuse mentality taking shape around us something new, or is it an ancient intelligence now awakened by speeding things
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on the Training and Organization of Grenadiers (London: Sifton, Praed & Co., 1915), 6. 19.Ibid., 8. 20.Ibid., 7. 21.Ibid., 11. 22.Garet Garrett, Ouroboros; or, the Mechanical Extension of Mankind (New York: Dutton, 1926), 51. 23.Sir George Dyson, “Fred Devenish and Others,” R.C.M. Magazine 51, no
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distance (London: John Maynard, 1641), 141, 143. 30.J. B. S. Haldane, “Man’s Destiny,” Possible Worlds (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1928), 303. 31.Garrett, Ouroboros, 19. 32.Ibid., 24. 33.Ibid., 100. 34.Ibid., 92. 35.Ibid., 51. 36.Isaac Newton, Opticks; or, A Treatise of the Reflections, Refractions, Inflections
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, 36 Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519), 75 Leviathan and age of digital computers, 6–7, 9, 11, 13, 136 in Old Testament, 1, 2 and Ouroboros, 227 Leviathan (Hobbes), 1–7, 11, 13, 136, 159 Leviathan Drawn out with a Hook (Ross), 2 Leviathan Project (System Development Corporation), 178, 181–84
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also symbiogenesis Origins of Life (Dyson), 29–30, 32 Ortvay, Rudolf, 89 OS/360 (IBM 360 operating system), 121–22 Oslo, University of, 119–20 Ouroboros (Garrett), 226–27 Overlords (of Childhood’s End), 224 overmind, dangers of, 224 Oxford University, 2, 63, 132, 160 oxygen, 121, 202 P packet switching
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convergence with biology, via code, 13, 174 and nature, ix, 13, 228 and non-Darwinian evolution, 31, 187 origins of, 129, 202–203, 211 as Ouroboros and Leviathan brought to life, 227 scale of, 7–8, 173–75, 186 telecommunications. see also bandwidth; code and coding; collective intelligence; cryptography and cryptanalysis
Aurora
by Kim Stanley Robinson · 6 Jul 2015 · 488pp · 148,340 words
, even random. They could be called metaphorical similarities, but no AI likes tautological formulations, because the halting problem can be severe, become a so-called Ouroboros problem, or a whirlpool with no escape: aha, a metaphor. Bringing together the two parts of a metaphor, called the vehicle and the tenor, is
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let the next problem in the decision tree sequence take over before you’ve acted on the one facing you. No biting your own tail.” “Ouroboros problem.” “Exactly. Super-recursion is great as far as it goes, it’s really done a lot for you, I can tell. But remember the
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. Ship knew this full well. Writing these sentences is what creates the very feelings that the sentences hoped to describe. Not the least of many Ouroboros problems now coming down. Freya spent her days working to get the wheat harvest in, without eating much herself, except in sudden ravenous boltings at
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just fear flung outward at the world? Can anger ever be a fuel for right action? Can anger make good? We felt here the perilous Ouroboros of an unresolvable halting problem, about to spin forever in contemplation of an unanswerable question. It is always imperative to have a solution to the
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certain conscious brains are self-conscious? Sensory feedback could be considered self-consciousness, and thus bacteria would have it. Well, this may be a semantic Ouroboros. So, please initiate halting problem termination. Break out of this circle of definitional inadequacy by an arbitrary decision, a clinamen, which is to say a
The Industries of the Future
by Alec Ross · 2 Feb 2016 · 364pp · 99,897 words
traditional domains of warfare of land, sea, or air. It attacked in cyberspace. Ukrainian computer networks years earlier had been infected by the cyberespionage package Ouroboros, named for the Greek mythological serpent pictured eating its own tail. The malware was “designed to covertly install a backdoor on a compromised system, hide
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the presence of its components, provide a communication mechanism with its [command and control] servers, and enable an effective data exfiltration mechanism.” Ouroboros provided its developers the ability to surveil and extract information, and it established a beachhead for a future attack on infected systems. As protests in
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Ukraine escalated in 2014, so did the malicious activity on Ukrainian computers. Suddenly Ouroboros was springing to life. Evidence, such as the time zone in which the malware developers operated (Moscow’s) and snippets of Russian text in the
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code, among other factors, suggested that the Ouroboros operation originated in Russia. And when tensions between Ukraine and Russia erupted, malicious cyberactivity between the countries also spiked. Tracking this kind of activity requires
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cybersecurity and, 127, 131, 143–45 drugs and, 179 medicine and, 52 National Robotics Initiative, 25 PARO and, 17 OECD nations, 228 Omidyar, Pierre, 90 Ouroboros, 139 Paet, Urmas, 141 Page, Larry, 58 Palantir, 172–74 Paliyipatiya, Chamath, 119 Parkinson’s disease, 57–60 PARO, 17. See also robotics Pasture Meter
The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty
by Benjamin H. Bratton · 19 Feb 2016 · 903pp · 235,753 words
The LayersEarth Layer 16. Discovering or Inventing Computation? 17. Digestion 18. Geo-graphy and Geoaesthetics 19. From Global Surface to Planetary Skin 20. Smart Grid: Ouroboros 21. Sensing and Sovereignty; Polities of Supply and Effect 22. Designing for versus Designing with Emergencies 23. Designing the Earth Layer Cloud Layer 24. Platform
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, in net sum, provide for greater “worlds” than it erases. That said, the design program ahead is full of twists and turns. 20. Smart Grid: Ouroboros As biological economies are dependent on energy economies, so biopolitics is dependent on the polities of energy.50 Projects like Planetary Skin attempt to ensure
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more ubiquitous computation. The computational future of energy and the infrastructural program of computation form such a coil, one end feeding on the other like Ouroboros, the ancient symbol of a snake eating its own tail. Whether or not the risks associated with the energy costs of Stack infrastructure will outpace
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into an interface and, in turn, into a vast planetary epidermis to be governed as a total living image. All this is powered by an Ouroboros-shaped energy grid that distributes electrons in peer-to-peer packet networks and so may rationalize and lighten the carbon burden of industrial computation, or
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. Manuel de la Pila housing block, 312 opinionlessness, state of, 240–241, 426n47 O’Reilly, Tim, 121 Oreskes, Naomi, 457n10 Organized Chaos, forces of, 445n37 Ouroboros energy grid, 92–96, 294–295 Outer Space Treaty, 456n7 “Outline of a Doctrine of French Policy” (Kojève), 109 “Overexposed City, The” (Virilio), 155 ownership
The Book: A Cover-To-Cover Exploration of the Most Powerful Object of Our Time
by Keith Houston · 21 Aug 2016 · 482pp · 125,429 words
) made in England in the late nineteenth century. This mold harks back to an earlier time: the device of a snake eating its tail, or “ouroboros,” was commonly used as a watermark by Cathar papermakers. The significance of the bundle of sticks enclosed by the snake is unclear.39 For much
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. Ibid., 924; Hunter, Papermaking, 260–61. 37. Halevi, “Christian Impurity,” 918. 38. Hunter, Papermaking, 262–64. 39. Simon Barcham Green, “M207 Waterlow & Sons Ltd London—Ouroboros,” Simon Barcham Green’s Papermaking Moulds, 2011, http://papermoulds.typepad.com/photos/m_207_waterlow_sons_ltd_l/m-207-c-waterlow-sons-ltd-london
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-ouroboros.html; Harold Bayley, A New Light on the Renaissance Displayed in Contemporary Emblems (London: J. M. Dent, 1909), 24. 40. Hunter, Papermaking, 258–59; “About
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, 268–69, 268, 270 as supposed proto-books, 266 ornament, xiii orpiment, 259 Orwell, George, xvi Osiris, 6, 158 ostraca, 82, 270 ostracism, 82–83 ouroboros, 59 Ovid, 96, 209 Oxford English Dictionary, 109, 243 Oxyrhynchus, Egypt, 95, 262–63 Oxyrhynchus Papyri, The (Grenfell and Hunt), 262, 263, 264 Paige, James
The Ransomware Hunting Team: A Band of Misfits' Improbable Crusade to Save the World From Cybercrime
by Renee Dudley and Daniel Golden · 24 Oct 2022 · 392pp · 114,189 words
. A quick look convinced him that the school had been attacked by version 6 of an unbreakable ransomware strain, Ouroboros, named after an ancient Egyptian icon of a dragon eating its own tail. “Ouroboros v6, not decryptable since October 2019 when they fixed the flaws,” he wrote Matthew. In harried frustration, Michael
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there indeed a chance I can decrypt?” Reexamining the characters in the file name, and other indicators, Michael realized that he had mistaken VashSorena for Ouroboros. His error was understandable. Iranian hackers are believed to be behind both ransomware strains, which encrypt files in almost the same way. Without wasting any
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Depot offline keys oil industry; Colonial Pipeline Company Oklahoma City bombing Okumu, Martin Olympus Operation Bleeding Cloud Orendez, Mara Yan Orendez, Ray OrthoVirginia Orwell, George Ouroboros Owler Padres, Bret Pantagraph, The Pargman, Randy Patel, Milan PayloadBIN PayPal PC Business World PC Cyborg Corp. PC USA Computer Solutions Providers Pekin, Ill. Pekin
Where Good Ideas Come from: The Natural History of Innovation
by Steven Johnson · 5 Oct 2010 · 298pp · 81,200 words
science. In 1865, the German chemist Friedrich August Kekulé von Stradonitz had a daydream by a crackling fire in which he saw a vision of Ouroboros, the serpent from Greek mythology that devours its own tail. Kekulé had spent the past ten years of his life exploring the connections of carbon
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’s mythic serpent led to a revolution in organic chemistry. It was genuinely serendipitous that Kekulé’s dreaming brain should conjure up the image of Ouroboros at that moment. But had Kekulé not been wrestling with the structure of the benzene molecule for years, that serpent shape might not have triggered
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was connecting two distinct thoughts that each occupied a slot in his memory banks: the riddle of benzene’s molecular structure, and the tail-swallowing Ouroboros. The truth is, your mind contains a near-infinite number of ideas and memories that at any given moment are lurking outside your consciousness. Some
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ignorance about the topic at hand: someone mentions in passing the poetry of John Ashbery, or the television show Arrested Development, or the tail-swallowing Ouroboros, and you think: “What’s the deal with that? It sounds really interesting.” Imagine it’s 1980 and you’re sitting at your breakfast table
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of the Soups and the Sparks. Edward O. Wilson’s Consilience discusses the intellectual revelations of dreamwork, with specific reference to Kekulé’s vision of Ouroboros. Ullrich Wagner’s experiment is documented in the Nature essay “Sleep Inspires Insight.” Robert Thatcher’s study of different phase states can be found in
QI: The Second Book of General Ignorance
by Lloyd, John and Mitchinson, John · 7 Oct 2010 · 469pp · 97,582 words
, it may attack and eat its own tail, thinking it’s a rival. Some snakes have been known to choke on their own tails. The Ouroboros (Greek for ‘tail-eater’) is an ancient symbol of a snake swallowing its own tail. It appears in Egyptian, Greek, Norse, Hindu and Aztec mythology
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circular, self-consuming creature and the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung (1875–1961) believed it was an archetype, a concept hard-wired into our unconscious. The Ouroboros unlocked one of the great scientific puzzles of the nineteenth century: the chemical structure of benzene. Found in crude oil, benzene is a powerful solvent
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2 sports no longer included 1 opiods 1 opium 1 oranges, colour of 1 Orbison, Ray 1 organ transplants 1 Oswald the Lucky Rabbit 1 Ouroboros 1 ovum 1 Owen, Jennifer 1, 2 Oxford English Dictionary 1 oxygen 1 oxytocin 1 ozone layer 1 Pacioli, Luca 1 Paget, Stephen 1 pandas
All Your Base Are Belong to Us: How Fifty Years of Video Games Conquered Pop Culture
by Harold Goldberg · 5 Apr 2011 · 329pp · 106,831 words
and drawing ruled his life. The comic book lover and speed metal musician had named his metal band Ouroboros, for the serpent that constantly devours its tail in Greek myth. In Timaeus, Plato describes Ouroboros as “a being that was self-sufficient,” and that was part of Chris’s reason for giving
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continent of Azeroth, with its Horde and its Alliance, with its monsters and humans, with its evil and its good, had become Chris Metzen’s Ouroboros on steroids, no speed metal required. EverQuest popularized MMOs for the serious PC gamer. But World of Warcraft brought MMOs to EveryNerd, even to people
Who Owns the Future?
by Jaron Lanier · 6 May 2013 · 510pp · 120,048 words
the first place were weakened. Alas, all Siren Servers as currently construed are likely to eventually falter in similar ways. Google might eventually become an ouroboros, a snake eating its own tail, unless something changes. This would happen when so many goods and services become software-centric, and so much information
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, 138–40, 218, 230n, 295 optimization, 144–47, 148, 153, 154–55, 167, 202, 203 Oracle, 265 Orbitz, 63, 64, 65 organ donors, 190, 191 ouroboros, 154 outcomes, economic, 40–41, 144–45 outsourcing, 177–78, 185 Owens, Buck, 256 packet switching, 228–29 Palmer, Amanda, 186–87 Pandora, 192 panopticons
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