Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) have become pervasive terms that are increasingly found in ever expanding contexts and applications. At its core, ML/AI is a practice, however remote it may be, of an exhaustive mapping, automating, controlling, manipulating (and directly or indirectly influencing), the physical, mental, psychological, and social world. Embodied and enactive theories of cognition tell us that humans and the social world at large is not something that can be neatly mapped, formalised, automated or predicted. Yet, this does not stop researchers, big tech and startups alike from putting forward tools and models that claim to sort, classify or predict aspects of human behaviour, characteristics, and actions. The integration of these generative, classification, and predictive tools into daily lives has numerous implications for our techno-futures. In this talk, I discuss some of these implications including how languages are being altered as a result of automated content moderation.
A wild tale of how Allende’s engineers dared challenge corporations and spy agencies – and almost won. Theirs was a battle for the very soul of our information technology. And we still have much to learn from it. Written and presented by Evgeny Morozov. Coming out in the summer of 2023.
Just as everyone in ‘former Yugoslavia’ is actually living in the future Yugoslavia (https://rememberingyugoslavia.com/), the possibility of things having been different lives on in our imagination – the poet president and grounded utopian ambitions contrasted to the evil in the name of ideology that followed https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24qn991dxiQ
[I’m never sure where a legitimate connection to systems|complexity|cybernetics ends with OD and group dynamics stuff – I think I’m about to become more open to including this sort of concept. Not least because some of the responses to my LinkedIn post today https://www.linkedin.com/posts/antlerboy_time-out-of-time-toot-activity-7046729884106133505-8POM/ emphasised the connections]
John Salinsky, June 2009
Balint beginsBalint groups are named after the psychoanalyst Michael Balint (1896-1970). In the late 1950s, Michael and his wife Enid began holding psychological training seminars for GPs in London. This work was first described in the book The Doctor, his Patient and the Illness (1957). There were no lectures and the doctors’ education was based on case presentation and discussion in a small group of nine or ten with a psychoanalyst leader. To begin with, Balint encouraged the group members to hold ‘long interviews’ with their problem patients. This helped the doctors to concentrate on becoming good listeners. Subsequently the focus changed to studying the relationship between doctor and patient in the context of every day ordinary-length consultations. The groups met once a week for a number of years so that patients and their progress could be followed up. The continuity also enabled group members to feel at ease with each other. Since those early days, Balint groups have spread across the world and in 22 countries there are national Balint Societies whose aim is to foster and develop the Balint approach.
The Multifaceted Sensemaking Theory: A Systematic Literature Review and Content Analysis on Sensemakingby John R. Turner 1,*,Jeff Allen 2,Suliman Hawamdeh 2 andGujjula Mastanamma 2
Cover Story (view full-size image): Aviation is characterized by many stakeholders, long lifespans, and high requirements for safety, security, and documentation. To meet these as well as customer needs, aircraft are regularly retrofitted with new cabins. During the planning and execution of this cabin retrofit, handling the required data poses a challenge. While many of them are available in some form, there is a lack of a digitally usable dataset of the specific aircraft. To support the overall process of retrofitting aircraft, an approach to model-driven data handling tailored to the unique circumstances of aviation is introduced. It combines systems engineering and data science techniques framed by an iterative procedure that creates and enhances a digitally accessible dataset and eases access to needed information. View this paper
Here’s the link to the ‘journal’ ‘edition’ https://www.mdpi.com/2079-8954/11/3
I will link to two articles I’m particularly interested in, but with no guaranteee of quality or quality of review.
My concern – here’s what I posted on a listserver:
While I’m very interested in at least two of these articles (Oshry and Bowen and Sensemaking), the range here and the lack of theme and the dubious qualifications of some of the articles to be about ‘systems’ reinforce my concerns about the journal and about any serious organisations or individuals associating with it and thereby lending it credibility. The lack of editing I have noted in some articles supports this.
It has been named as a predatory journal along with many published by MDPI – MDPI of course strenuously refute this but ‘aggressively rent-seeking’ doesn’t feel like an inappropriate response. Links below including MDPI’s attack.
As a systems community, don’t we have a responsibilty to take this seriously?
The book Ecological Limits to Development: Living with the Sustainable Development Goals, published in 2002 by Routledge, was released as open access in 2023 by Taylor-Francis for readers who don’t have access to a university library.
Developing a Systems Thinking Lens for Collective LeadershipOne of the core components of Collective Leadership is about understanding complexity and the role of systems thinking as we seek to work on complex societal issues. This resource was prepared in partnership with Joan O’Donnell, who undertook an internship with the Collective Leadership for Scotland Team in 2022. It is offered as a guide to systems thinking and how to adopt a systems thinking approach as part of our wider Collective Leadership and Public Policy work.873878_SCT0123759776-001_Collective Leadership Brochure_FINAL
Join us as we commemorate and celebrate the extraordinary life of George Spencer-Brown (1923-2016) on the 100th anniversary of his birth!
By GSB SocietyFollow
When and where
Sunday, April 2 · 6 – 8pm BST
Please join us on Sunday, April 2nd 2023 for a live commemoration and celebration of George Spencer-Brown. We will be joined by friends who knew Spencer-Brown and who will share brief recollections of his life. We will also be announcing the formation of our society, news about our recent and forthcoming publications, and information about our upcoming conferences.
This event will be open to audiences interested in the life and the work of George Spencer-Brown, and will be made available to a wider public after the event via YouTube.
Spencer-Brown’s 1969 book Laws of Form was a work of pure mathematics that many recognized as being of tremendous spiritual and scientific importance, giving the text a significant metaphysical aura and its author a legendary status that is quite rare today. The biography of Spencer-Brown lives up to the mythology, and we will hear all about that at this event.
Start: 6.00 pm BST (5.00 pm UTC / 1.00 pm EST / 10.00 am PDT)
In this episode Justin Pearl and Matt Baker speak again to Randy Dible about George Spencer Brown’s hugely influential but not widely-known mathematical grimoire Laws of Form, originally published in 1969.
Randy is a lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at St. Joseph’s University in New York, and a doctoral student in the Department of Philosophy, at The New School for Social Research. His work is in ontological phenomenology, history of philosophical ideas, and Ancient Greek philosophy.
[I feel I’ve read – and shared – this before, but it’s only just been posted…]
Pond brains and GPT-4
Gordon Brander
Stafford Beer and Gordon Pask were building a pond that thinks. Their biological computing project set out to build ecosystems with inputs and outputs, that could function as computers…
Systems Community of Inquiry 
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