About the PSYCHO-TIK Collection taken from the NEURO-TIK Foundation Archives
These fragments of comic books, pamphlets, and paraphernalia are believed to date from sometime in the mid-twenty-first century. While it is unclear why they are in analogue formats, or why electronic media appears here in comic form, some historians postulate this might have served the purposes of secrecy. Psycho-historian Stanley Milgram[1] believes that the literature is a product of the paranoid delusions of a reactionary political movement known only by its nom de guerre, the Singularity Rebellion. He argues that it displays clear patterns of training in reverse-psychological propaganda. The comic pamphlets obviously borrow the most popular tactics of progressive movements to undermine their causes. Dr. Milgram has put forward a theory that these comics hide codes propagating a conspiracy theory. Their format, he argues, helped evade identification and tracing. This conspiracy theory suggests that there was a secret organisation, working through guest workers and immigrants,[2] whose sole aim was to brainwash the population and render them servile.
Other historians, however, postulate that this was simply entertainment created by now defunct media conglomerates, attached to a network of electronic media and commodities, including fan sites, action figures, drones, and other entertainments. The electronic versions may have been destroyed in the Great Data Migration or were simply regarded as such rubbish that even the overly storage-obsessed denizens of the twenty-first century did not bother to save them. Lacking any financial incentives and protocols for saving data, the information loss from the era has been substantial. In fact, no small number of historians has suggested that while the period is often referred to as the 'Information Age', the term is deceptive. It would be more accurate to call the period 'The Age of Information Loss'.
What we do know is that a popular genre of literature in the period was titled 'science' or 'speculative' fiction. Often miming the scientific and economic models of the day, these comics extrapolated current trends in technology and science into the future. Such speculations often turned out to be almost as predictable as any non-neuro-evolutionary prediction algorithm. Most storylines, to paraphrase a famous author, 'ended where most computer simulations do…somewhere between the demise of human liberty and the extinction of the human race and terrestrial life'.[3] Such aestheticised predictive analytics appeared to largely inform the political imaginaries of the time as well, a politics that largely mirrored its technology in vacillating between paranoid pattern seeking and simple noisy incoherence.
About Us: The NEURO-TIK Technologies Foundation Archive
Better future predictions can be made through the close analysis and consideration of past errors. This process of reinforced learning is a technical as well as historical principle. Archivists have long understood the limits of their data collection practices, but only now have we begun to understand how programming and archiving share similar concerns and can harness the same novel tools to overcome these limits.
Our goal is the elimination of programming and the evolutionary growth of new parameters via which our systems will be able to expand and learn far beyond their current limitations. To this end, the NEURO-TIK Technologies Corporation has collected the detritus of the twenty-first century. And it would be hard to find a more biased, idiosyncratic, and uninformative data set! Self-organisation has been found to be difficult. Our systems continue to need reinforcement and training, and are often prone to volatile errors and large biases. As countless past A.I. researchers have cautioned, 'A good data set can tell you about the world, but a bad data set can only tell you about itself!'
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