For a copy of McKeown’s lecture slides, see →.
For details on this example, see Jeffrey Pennington, Richard Socher, and Christopher Manning, “Glove: Global Vectors for Word Representation,” Proceedings of the 2014 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP) (2014).
Although even the French theory of Foucault and Derrida was deeply influenced by cybernetics. See Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan, Code: From Information Theory to French Theory (Duke University Press, 2023).
Jimena Canales, Bedeviled: A Shadow History of Demons in Science (Princeton University Press, 2020).
Here I’m reading Laplace through the magnificent history of demonology in science by Canales in Bedeviled.
Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (1988): 575.
Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (Sage, 1992).
Karl Marx, Grundrisse, 1858 →.
Harry Davies, Bethan McKernan, and Dan Sabbagh “‘The Gospel’: How Israel Uses AI to Select Bombing Targets in Gaza,” The Guardian, December 1, 2023 →; Kim Lyons, “Use of Clearview AI Facial Recognition Tech Spiked as Law Enforcement Seeks to Identify Capitol Mob,” The Verge, January 10, 2021 →.
Allie Funk, Adrian Shahbaz, and Kian Vesteinsson, “AI Chatbots Are Learning to Spout Authoritarian Propaganda,” Wired, October 4, 2023 →.
Leonie Cater and Melissa Heikkilä, “Your Boss Is Watching: How AI-Powered Surveillance Rules the Workplace,” Politico, May 27, 2021 →.
Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig, Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, 4th ed. (Pearson, 2020) →.
The two articles in which Shannon introduced this idea have been compiled as a book with an accessible introduction by Warren Weaver: Claude E. Shannon and Warren Weaver, The Mathematical Theory of Communication (University of Illinois Press, 1963).
“For any logical expression satisfying certain conditions, one can find a net behaving in the fashion it describes.” Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts, “A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity,” Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics 5, no. 4 (1943); Frank Rosenblatt, “The Perceptron: A Probabilistic Model for Information Storage and Organization in the Brain,” Psychological Review 65, no.6 (1959), 386.
Norber Wiener, Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (MIT Press, 1948); Arturo Rosenblueth, Norbert Wiener, and Julian Bigelow, “Behavior, Purpose and Teleology,” Philosophy of Science 10, no. 1 (1943).
For a fantastic introduction to cybernetics, see Ronald Kline, The Cybernetics Moment (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015).
“Standard multilayer feedforward networks with as few as one hidden layer using arbitrary squashing functions are capable of approximating any Borel measurable function from one finite dimensional space to another to any desired degree of accuracy, provided sufficiently many hidden units are available.” Kurt Hornik, Maxwell Stinchcombe, and Halbert White, “Multilayer Feedforward Networks Are Universal Approximators,” Neural Networks 2, no. 5 (1989).
Niklas Luhmann, Social Systems, trans. John Bednarz, Jr. with Dirk Baecker (Stanford University Press, 1996).
Jakob von Uexküll, A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans, trans. Joseph D. O’Neil (University of Minnesota Press, 2010).
Emily M. Bender and Alexander Koller Bender, “Climbing Towards NLU: On Meaning, Form, and Understanding in the Age of Data,” Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (2020).
Michel Callon, “Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation: Domestication of the Scallops and the Fishermen of St. Brieuc Bay,” Sociological Review 32, no. 1 (1984).
Michael J. Reddy, “The Conduit Metaphor,” in Metaphor and Thought, 2nd ed., ed. Andrew Ortony (Cambridge University Press, 1993).
Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton University Press, 2015).
Matteo Pasquinelli, The Eye of the Master: A Social History of Artificial Intelligence (Verso, 2023).
The nature of the Pirate Bay changed a lot as a result of the trial, and many make a sharp distinction between the site pre- and post-trial.
Maria Eriksson et al., Spotify Teardown: Inside the Black Box of Streaming Music (MIT Press, 2017).
Most of the blogs that drove this debate have since ceased to exist, but the relevant posts can be found through Archive.org. These include historian and Piratbyrån spokesperson Rasmus Fleisher, “Pirate Politics: From Accelerationism to Escalationism?,” Copyriot (blog), January 13, 2010 →; and philosopher of science and hacktivist Christopher Kullenberg, “Tunneled Cipherspace / Burrow Internet,” Intensifier (blog), January 21, 2010 →.
This history has been recounted by Rasmus Fleischer, “Vastavallankumous,” in Verkko suljettu: Internet ja avoimuuden rajat, ed. Mikael Brunila and Kimmo Kallio (Into Kustannus, 2014).
Christopher Kullenberg, “FRAktivism – Några möjliga vägar,” Intensifier (blog), January 9, 2010 →. Translation by the author.
For one history of the relationship between accelerationism and tunnel politics, see Mikael Brunila, “Runsauden räjähdys: Internet hakutalouden jälkeen,” in Verkko suljettu.
Gabriella Coleman, “How Has the Fight for Anonymity and Privacy Advanced Since Snowden’s Whistle-Blowing?,” Media, Culture & Society 41, no. 4 (2019).
However, one would be well-advised to not trust any of the services provided by Meta. See for instance Jim Salter, “WhatsApp ‘End-to-End Encrypted’ Messages Aren’t That Private After All,” Ars Technica, September 8, 2021→.
See →.
Using terminology from Gilles Deleuze, we might say that language becomes content for the expression of embeddings. Following linguist Zellig Harris, doctoral advisor to Noam Chomsky, we might further say that embeddings thus take on the appearance of a meta-language, which assigns meta-meanings to human language and other structures of meaning. Gilles Deleuze, Foucault (Continuum, 1999); Zellig Harris, Language and Information (Columbia University Press, 1988). See also Mikael Brunila and Jack LaViolette, “What Company Do Words Keep? Revisiting the Distributional Semantics of J. R. Firth & Zellig Harris,” Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (2022) →.
Karl Marx, Capital, vol 1. (1867) →.
“Language modelling is compression,” as researchers at Google and other top AI institutes recently wrote. See Grégoire Delétang et al., “Language Modeling Is Compression,” arXiv, September 19, 2023 →.
DeepSeek-AI et al., “DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learning,” arXiv, January 22, 2025 →.
Lingjiao Chen, Matei Zaharia, and James Zou, “How Is ChatGPT’s Behavior Changing Over Time?,” arXiv, July 18, 2023 →.
See →.
Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble: How the New Personalized Web Is Changing What We Read and How We Think (Penguin, 2011).
Neil Smith, Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space (University of Georgia Press, 2008).
While DeepSeek trained its model with a much smaller number of GPUs, it still had access to a very large cluster of them. The GPU wars are by no means over.
Tiqqun, The Cybernetic Hypothesis, (Semiotext(e), 2020).
For one survey of local differential privacy, see Mengmeng Yang et al., “Local Differential Privacy and Its Applications: A Comprehensive Survey,” Computer Standards & Interfaces, no. 89 (April 2024). For a particularly compelling example of homomorphic encryption, see Samir Jordan Menon and David J. Wu, “Spiral: Fast, High-Rate Single-Server PIR via FHE Composition,” Cryptology ePrint Archive (2022) →.
For a comment on this from the tunnel discussions in the Swedish blogosphere, see Magnus Eriksson, “Pop Culture and Tunnels,” Blay (blog), January 19, 2010 →.
Models that are trained on outputs from other models tend to generate content around an increasingly narrow statistical norm. Ilia Shumailov et al., “The Curse of Recursion: Training on Generated Data Makes Models Forget,” arXiv, May 27, 2023 →.
Fleisher, “Pirate Politics.”
On the “right to opacity” see Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (University of Michigan Press, 2010), 189.