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Pribor.io – Self-Aware Machines (AI)
SAM (Self-Aware Machines) based on a true understanding of the human psyche
Paul Jorion’s Approach to a Genuine birth of Artificial Intelligence… Read the rest
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“Freudian metapsychology and AI systems”, Chapter 4 of a forthcoming book: Humanising Artificial Intelligence. Psychoanalysis and the Problem of Control
Humanising Artificial Intelligence. Psychoanalysis and the Problem of Control, Luca Possati (ed.)Chapter 4: “Freudian metapsychology and AI systems”, by Paul Jorion
For eighty years now speculative thinkers have debated Isaac Asimov’s “3 Laws of robotics”, a bundle of 3 simple interlocking directions supposedly sufficient for regulating the behaviour of robots and making their daily interaction with human beings both useful and unproblematic.
Although Asimov’s 3 laws have been the centre of profuse and vivid exchanges, they’ve been entirely ignored when engineers started to implement actual robots or “intelligent machines” broadly speaking.
The reason for such a surprising disconnect … Read the rest
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VUB, Stewardship of Finance, 1st lecture, The background: The stewardship of finance and the subprime crisis, September 30, 2013
I’m reminding you that access is free : QB lecture room, every Monday from 4 to 6 P.M., Pleinlaan, 1050 Brussels.
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COMPLEXITY AND THE “SKYNET EFFECT”
This is the translation by John Holland of my post entitled Complexité et effet Skynet, originally published on June 16th 2012.
The world in which we live today increasingly resembles a science fiction film from the 1950s. Some of those films were excellent because they raised fundamental questions about how machines seize power. Put more simply, they explored how the invasion of the machines–an invasion we have actively fostered for several centuries–leads us to lose control of the world. The film 2001, A Space Odyssey (1968) culminates in a battle: the machine that is really in charge of the … Read the rest
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VUB, “Stewardship of Finance” Chair, inaugural lecture : Why Stewardship of Finance?, October 4 2012
The inaugural lecture of the chair “Stewardship of Finance”, delivered by me at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, on the 4th of October 2012.
Why Stewardship of Finance?
When in the Autumn of 2011 I was first approached by Michel Flamée on behalf of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel about the chair I’m privileged to speak from today, the question of how it would ultimately be called was still undecided. The Flemish phrase used in the early discussions was “ethisch financieren”: financing in an ethical manner.
“Ethical finance”, “responsible finance”, “sustainable finance”, so many different phrases have been used to name … Read the rest
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VUB, “Stewardship of Finance” Chair, inaugural lecture, 4th October 2012
Some pictures of the audience, of some well-known fixtures of the blog, as well as the introductory speeches of the chair.… Read the rest
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READING LIST FOR THE “STEWARDSHIP OF FINANCE” COURSE AT VUB, STARTING OCTOBER 4th
1. Historians of finance
Martin Meyer:
The Bankers, New York: Weybright & Talley, 1974
Markets, New York: Norton, 1988Peter L. Bernstein:
Capital Ideas, New York: Free Press, 1992
Against the Gods. The Remarkable Story of Risk, Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 1996Steve Fraser:
Every Man a Speculator. A History of Wall Street in American Life, New York: Harper Collins, 2005
… Read the rest -
ECUADOR OFFERS POLITICAL ASYLUM TO JULIAN ASSANGE
With Great Britain suddenly threatening to invade the Ecuadorean embassy in London, methinks we will be hearing more about this one. Methinks that this might just be the famous single spark that can start a prairie fire. Methinks that we have the potential here of an Ems dispatch, of a certain assassination at Sarajevo, of a certain incident in Gulf of Tonkin.
An intuition, nothing more than a simple intuition.… Read the rest
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THOSE RESPONSIBLE FOR THE CRISIS WHO ARE RARELY TALKED ABOUT
Translated from the French by Tim Gupwell
The question of whether a debt contract can be considered as money is central to my book L’argent mode d’emploi (2009). I expose the violence exerted by Joseph Schumpeter (1883-1950), when he imposed the idea that such was the case, and I demonstrated the inanity of the pseudo-arguments that he advanced – employing phrases that often lacked any sense – to support the idea (p. 175 – 180).
A debt contract is indeed another form of money according to Schumpeter, and its amount can be added to that of money in order to … Read the rest
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THE MANIPULATION OF THE LIBOR
Translated from the French by Tim Gupwell
In my Friday morning video (in French), I said that when a pirate (Rupert Murdoch) does business with a ship wrecker (the City of London), it tends to weaken the entire system, and I went on to add that this is particularly the case when the population, which is observing all this from afar, starts to exhibit a certain degree of indignation.
The LIBOR affair has been widely discussed for several days now, due to the 290 million pound fine imposed on the British bank Barclays. My reaction hitherto has been limited to … Read the rest
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HOW CREDIT DEFAULT SWAPS WILL HAVE DESTROYED THE EURO
How credit default swaps will have destroyed the Euro
12 juin 2012 par Paul Jorion
And what of the CDS (credit-default swap) speculators who don’t pay taxes? Why don’t we hear anything about them? We hear a lot about the Greeks not paying their taxes, and at the moment, due to the tactlessness of some, we hear a lot about international civil servants (more precisely those of the International Monetary Fund) who don’t pay taxes, but, in the case of CDS speculators who pay no taxes, goodness knows why – not a word!
It has to be said that it … Read the rest
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QUESTIONS STILL IN NEED TO BE SOLVED (II) PROFIT, THE SOURCE OF ALL OUR ILLS
An English translation by Jean-Loup Komarower of the post QUESTIONS À RÉSOUDRE (II) LE PROFIT, SOURCE DE TOUS NOS MAUX
Robert Owen (1771-1858) was a Welsh social reformer, one of the founders of the cooperative movement. As a very early socialist who was blamed for being strictly speaking a “communist”, he considered profit as the source of all our ills. Owen asserted that profit is pure spoliation: workers were robbed of a benefit that should be theirs. Because profit skims part of the value produced by the worker’s labour, it becomes impossible for the latter to be a consumer of … Read the rest
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“No Matter What We Do, It Will Still Be The Same”
An English translation by Bernard Bouvet of my « QUOI QU’ON FASSE, CE SERA LA MÊME CHOSE ! » of March 11.
77% of you, my dear blog readers, not all of you, but a “comfortable majority” of you, happens to be French. Your country is now in full “election showbiz” mode, and the mainstream media, in the press, on the radio, on television, are full of it, news on why the moment is “crucial” and “how to vote”, are front and centre.
Still, you are perfectly conscious of the fact that whatever which way you vote, either for … Read the rest
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IT IS TIME TO RESTRUCTURE CAPITALISM
An English translation which can be read here of my post “Refonder le capitalisme”: Le moment est venu by Frankly.
It Is Time to Restructure Capitalism
Is there anything more depressing than the spectacle of the short-term remedies that are being applied at present with a view to saving the capitalist system, in the absence of determination to do what would actually be necessary to achieve that objective?
Look at what is happening in Greece, where the Troika (the European Union, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund) is endeavouring to impose on the Greek Government measures … Read the rest
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MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE: About “The network of global corporate control”, by S. Vitali, J. B. Glattfelder, S. Battiston
A passionate discussion has started on my French blog about the article The network of global corporate control, by S. Vitali, J. B. Glattfelder, S. Battiston.
I’m hoping that a parallel discussion in English starts here.
Here an excerpt of the paper to whet your appetite:
… Read the rest… nearly 4/10 of the control over the economic value of transnational corporations in the world is held, via a complicated web of ownership relations, by a group of 147 transnational corporations in the core, which has almost full control over itself. The top holders within the core can thus be thought of
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TAVAKOLI vs. JORION. The Subprime Crisis: an orchestrated or spontaneous Ponzi Process?
A translation by Bénédicte of my post of September 3rd: TAVAKOLI vs. JORION. LA CRISE DES SUBPRIMES : PYRAMIDE ORCHESTRÉE OU SPONTANÉE ?
You will find in my “La crise du capitalisme américain” (The Crisis of American Capitalism) (La Découverte 2007; Le Croquant 2009), written between November 2004 and October 2005, a chapter describing the dynamics of the crisis which was then underway. This chapter is entitled: “The price of shares and houses: financial bubbles” (pages 195 to 220) and it contains a section entitled: “The financial bubble as a ‘naturally occurring Ponzi process’”. … Read the rest
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FRANCE 24, The F24 Interview
With Annette Young, about the current developments of the crisis.