At least it's an ethos?

maximalism

Maximalism is, generally speaking, the idea that more is better. It often incorporates the idea that qualitative improvements are dependent on quantitative increases – that "progress" is not even possible without quantitative growth. Maximalism is prominent in many areas of modern technological civilization but is particularly so in computing, thanks to Moore's law.

Co-Creation: Systems Thinking Beyond the Machine

Complexity thinking is all the rage — in the arts and sciences. Yet, there are two different strands of thinking about complexity, which are often confounded. The first comes from cybernetics, focussing on control in complex situations. The second is ecological, aiming at sustainable participation in a reality beyond control. Their difference rests on a fundamental distinction: is complexity rooted in feedback regulation or collective co-creation? While feedback remains mechanistic, co-creation generates new spaces of possibilities. We need it to understand life and its evolution. And it empowers us to rewrite our future, to escape our mechanistic cage without abandoning scientific rigor. In this paper, we illustrate how we implement these powerful yet abstract principles through our artistic and philosophical practice.

Self-Control and the Theory of Consumption

To study the behavior of agents who are susceptible to temptation in infinite horizon consumption problems under uncertainty, we define and characterize dynamic self-control (DSC) preferences. DSC pr...

CHAPTER I. DARKNESS | The Superdark Factory | Antikythera

Imagine the most extreme possible factory that drives itself, determines its own objectives and optimizes itself to accomplish them. What would it mean to steer or govern such a thing?

The AI We Deserve

Critiques of artificial intelligence abound. Where’s the utopian vision for what it could be?

Tom Costello on Twitter / X

Apropos of everything here’s my uninformed idea for alignment: homeostatic mechanisms (control systems / cybernetics) that force a system to optimize for satiation and normal-range variation (rather than maximization) across a set of goals such that, if any one of them were…— Tom Costello (@tomstello_) September 9, 2026

Against optimization

One of the most inescapable edicts when leading a team is the order to optimize the system towards the organization’s goals.

Alexander Lerchner, The Abstraction Fallacy: Why AI Can Simulate But Not Instantiate Consciousness - PhilArchive

Computational functionalism dominates current debates on AI consciousness. This is the hypothesis that subjective experience emerges entirely from abstract causal topology, regardless of the underlying physical substrate. We argue this view ...

Amia Srinivasan · Stop the Robot Apocalypse: The New Utilitarians

Philosophers may talk about justice or rights, but they don’t often try to reshape the world according to their ideals...

Modeling non-dual awareness via constraint closure: a reinterpretation of groundlessness

Non-dual awareness (NDA) refers to a shift in consciousness in which the usual distinction between subject and object dissolves, and experience is no longer structured by conceptual mediation or goal-directed regulation. Meling enactivist model describes NDA as a meditative disclosure of groundlessness-the recognition of emptiness (śūnyatā), that all phenomena lack intrinsic nature. While enactivism explains autonomy through process closure, this article argues that constraint closure, as developed by Nave, extends that framework by making explicit how autonomy is sustained through the continual regeneration of its own relational conditions. This refinement prevents process-closure models from being read in substantialist terms when applied to complex cognitive systems, where stability arises through ongoing transformation rather than fixed organization. Nave's account builds on Juarrero theory of constraint causality, which replaces intrinsic forces with relational conditions-a view that parallels Nāgārjuna's Madhyamaka analysis of dependent origination. Integrating these perspectives, I propose that NDA corresponds to a shift from decoupled to precarious constraints, revealing that cognition and awareness persist not through intrinsic foundations but through the dynamic regeneration of interdependent relations.

Viability theory

Viability theory is an area of mathematics that studies the evolution of dynamical systems under constraints on the system state.[1][2] It was developed to formalize problems arising in the study of various natural and social phenomena, and has close ties to the theories of optimal control and set-valued analysis.

The Optimization Trap: Why Too Much Efficiency Makes Us Fragile - The Great Simplification

In this episode, Nate is joined by biologist and biophysicist Olivier Hamant to explore why living systems prioritize robustness over performance, and what that means for a civilization built almost entirely in the opposite direction.

Can AI Be Governed? Only If We Build Normatively Competent AI

Hadfield's discussion brings the idea of AI governance back to the core idea of steering the behavior of an AI system. As she notes, this not only involves technical questions about how AI systems ar...

Two Cheers for Anarchism: Six Easy Pieces on Autonomy, …

James Scott taught us what's wrong with seeing like a s…

Designs for the pluriverse: radical interdependence, autonomy, and the making of worlds

"Arturo Escobar presents a new vision of design theory by arguing for the creation of what he calls 'autonomous design'--a design practice aimed at channeling design's world-making capacity toward ways of being and doing that are deeply attuned to justice and the Earth"--Publisher description

Alexander Lerchner, The Abstraction Fallacy: Why AI Can Simulate But Not Instantiate Consciousness - PhilPapers

Computational functionalism dominates current debates on AI consciousness. This is the hypothesis that subjective experience emerges entirely from abstract causal topology, regardless of the underlying physical substrate. We argue this view ...