Hallucination and Panic in Autonomous Systems

This book applies the powerful asymptotic limit theorems of information and control theories to understanding the dynamics of dysfunction in cognitive cultural artifacts encompassing individual minds, small social groupings, institutions, machine systems, and their many critical composites. A particular focus is on attempts to build ‘intelligent machines’ that would supposedly rival or surpass human minds. All such efforts are blindsided by the reality that all such machines are cultural artifacts of those who build them, closely reflecting cultural priorities and blindness, and that intelligent entities lacking the feedback of high-speed embodiment must endure exaggerated levels of failure by fabulation and hallucination. A principal feature is the detailed working-out of many probability models that can serve as the foundation of statistical tools for the analysis of real-time, real-world data on cognitive failure across a broad range of modes, scales, and levels of organization.