“Data metabolic systems, I mean works that eat and […] digest data autonomously, and convert them into new data, always based on a software that I call “demon”.
In ancient Greece, the daemon was a translator between ideas and meta, gods and humans. And furthermore, a daemon or demon was a distributor of fate, of resources, goods and information.”
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“To this day, the word “demon” hides in many common words, theories and concepts. For example, democracy comes from demos, which means people or nations. And “daemos” derives from daemon. In this sense, a daemon is a governor, a decision maker, and an allocator.”
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“Demons today are not only fictional or mythical creatures in literature, religions, superstition, or pop culture. We find them also in science, technology, art, economics, and politics.
And as I said before, without demons there can be no governance, and no cybernetics.
Our daily lives are full of demons, and with the emergence of new technologies and A.I., cultural demons are becoming more and more relevant in a networked society. We find them in electronic devices, in the form of algorithmic trading, in biotechnology, surveillance technology – “
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“The ancient concepts of demons we have to sink in new contexts. More and more demons become machines; biochemical and digital machines.”
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“Another very strong demon, the Holy Spirit, enters not as a higher source any longer. It enhances the brain, digital and molecular. In future times maybe we are all enlightened people, speaking in tongues and glossolalia becomes a molecular and digital application in our brain.
For example, the company Neuralink, wants to implant brain computer interfaces – so called BCI, to connect the brain with the internet.
Ironically I can say in the future we may not only have artificial intelligence, we may have artificial identity.”
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“Deep meaning reminds me of DeepDream from Google [editor’s note: who, unironically, removed the motto “Don’t be evil” from their code of conduct policy…], and shows that the genius is not a person with special abilities, but someone who is controlled by a higher intelligence and ruled like a puppet.”
” – Fernando Corbato and the science team at the MIT, wrote the computer program “daemon”. It was a simple backup program, and daemon was a backronym for a disk and execution monitor. And this is important, because it was the beginning of machines started to talk to themselves. It influenced all later programs from chat BOTS to search BOTS to viruses and artificial intelligence agents. And in this sense, the most mightful and greedy demon who haunts the internet today is the Google bot.”
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“More and more demons take possession of our environment and connect us imperceptibly with networked processes. These demons lurk in smartphones and smart homes.”
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“Another cosmist, Nikolai Federov, describes the machinist of the future as a place not for death, but for technical reanimated humans. This was science fiction at the time, but today where Google, Facebook […] are constantly collecting data, a digital reapers is approaching technical feasability.
Ironically I would say, we will end not in graves, we will end as demons in cyberspace.”