#13 Kurt Cagle

Lucky number 13 - or how is it. The thirteenth episode of The Only Constant was indeed a lucky one, with Kurt Cagle joining me for a deep, enlightening and thought provoking discussion about AI, graphs, fractals, humanity, semantic web and language + more. Kurt is a true legend in graphs and semantic web, and it was an honor and pleasure to have him on the show this week.

Read more about Kurt at the bottom of this newsletter.

As always, I am very happy that we once again managed to make an episode that explores more than it explains ??

Listen to the episode here:

Apple: The Only Constant on Apple Podcasts

Spotify: The Only Constant | Podcast on Spotify

Google: The Only Constant ( google.com )

Spreaker: The Only Constant ( spreaker.com )

What made this episode special to me?:

Some months back, when I spoke to an old friend of mine about making The Only Constant, he said I should get in touch with Kurt as he was a legend in computer science. And I duly did. In the two conversations I had with Kurt that preceded the episode, I met not only a very smart computer science expert, but also a very broadly interested, engaged and enlightened person. Our chats went from one corner of old philosophy to modern politics and tech seamlessly, and this way of traversing between seemingly disparate disciplines with the same enthusiasm and curiosity meant I simply had to have Kurt on the podcast: he is explore more than explain.

Nevertheless, this episode is also the first one where I open by asking someone to explain when I ask Kurt to explain the semantic web. Issue is, to me, the concept is difficult to grasp. But Kurt manages this splendidly and our conversation moves brilliantly from that to graphs, to LLMs and to human society. And we sort of connect all of them in the end in the hypergraph. This rounded ending makes the episode a must-listen for anyone interested in AI, graph theory or social sciences - or all.

This episode has both the highest abstraction level of all episodes so far, but also some of the most clear insights. I learned a lot and gained valuable new perspectives that continues to make me think differently about the world.

My key post-recording deliberations are:

• LLMs are corporate beings. Kurt refuses to dismiss them as intelligent entirely because there are so many types of intelligence in existence, so why not one more? He then called them corporate beings, which resonated very well with me. They are beings of purely language.
• And they are hacking language! Language is the original human organisation, the primordial structure that made human society possible. This is not a car to replace horses, this is a mechanism to infect us - humans. That needs to be understood. Language is power.
• Until now, we have been constructing the world and our social structures. We have been the one guiding them and erecting them. Are we now at novel point where these social constructs start talking back to us? Is that what talking to our data really means? Like speaking to a country, e.g. This is a mindblowing thought.
• Hypergraph or metaverse? I think I will vote for the former, if it ever came down to a vote.

I hope you will enjoy the episode and Kurt's awesome insights. We could have spoken for hours and I hope he will rejoin me in the future for a follow up. The topic is not at all at its finale - rather, it is just beginning.

About Kurt Cagle:

Kurt Cagle is the current managing editor of The Cagle Report, and?was the former community editor for Data Science Central. Kurt is a published author with more than twenty books to his credit, and has been working as a technology editor for years, writing for Forbes, O'Reilly Media, IDC and others. He has also been a consulting information architect and ontologist with more than twenty years experience working with Fortune 100 companies and US and European agencies, and is a frequent speaker at conferences on data technologies