Delicacies is back! It is my incoherent, irregular, unpredictable collection of interesting sparks that I came across on the internet. Handpicked by a human, no robots, no AI. There is no fixed frequency for Delicacies: when there is enough material, I hit the publish button. That can be after a week, of after 3 months. No pressure, literally. Enjoy!
Artificial Bullshit – And then a real discussion of AI safety, speed, and governance – by Jeff Jarvis
Refik Anadol’s short talk at the second annual a16z crypto Founder Summit in November 2023, including some awesome state of the art Generative AI artworks > a must see.
Here, on my blog, I only share a couple of links. Sort of a teaser. If you can’t get enough of these and want more, you can hang on to the firehose, the extended version of Petervan’s Delicacies on Substack with loads of videos and visual sparks. Subscribe on the Substack Welcome Page.
Petervan Delicacies started as a Revue publication beging 2015. Revue was shut down end 2022 as part of Twitter’s larger feature overhaul since Elon Musk’s acquisition. By that time the counter was at 164 Delicacies issues.
The initial title of this post was “Let’s upgrade the illusion”, but that’s what Apple just did with the announcement of the Vision Pro. And I mean that in the positive sense, not as a criticism.
The quote “Let’s upgrade the illusion” comes from a keynote by Deepak Chopra during the December 2022 retreat of Nishith Desai Associates (NDA), a leading Legal & Tax Consulting company from India, with offices worldwide. It is in itself interesting to see a Legal & Tax Consulting company exclusively focused on new technologies like AI, XR, Nano, Bio, etc.
The event was hosted in NDA’s gorgeous campus “The Imaginarium”, a true infrastructure for imagination, pitched by the CEO as a “private infrastructure for the public good”. How cool is that?
But back to that keynote titled “The nature of reality, what is real?” – We jump in after 2 min:
Deepak kicks off by stating that everything is real if you are truly immersed in it: whatever you experience is an illusion. If everything is an illusion anyway, let’s then upgrade the illusion. To do so, says Deepak, ideas have to manifest. Therefore we need imagination.
Imagination is about EVERY experience, all senses, not only visual, Deepak goes on. And then he really got me when he explained:
“That what imagineS is consciousness, awareness, soul. That what imagineS has no form, no location in time or space, no boundary, and therefore is infinite. That what is imagineD has form, has location.”
This opens a field of possibilities, or better, a field of what can be imagined.
I agree with Peter Hinssen when he says that the Vision Pro is not an iPhone moment but an Apple LISA moment:
“I don’t agree with those who say that the Apple Vision Pro launch is a new iPhone moment. I believe it’s an Apple Lisa moment. The Apple Lisa was a true milestone in the history of personal computing. Just like the Lisa, the Apple Vision Pro is a technological marvel that is too expensive (for now) to join the mainstream but is setting completely new standards for the industry.”
Back to Deepak. In a second talk at the same event about “The Future of Wellbeing”, he kindly notices that scientists measure experiences, and artists have experiences. That scientists identify with Quanta, and artists with Qualia. “Qualia is a unit of experience”.
What if we would measure the success of the Vision Pro on its potential to dramatically increase our units of experience, expanding our notions and understandings of what is real.
This reminds me of David Chalmers’ book “REALITY+”, a philosophical masterpiece that basically states that any good illusion is indistinguishable from real.
Let’s mix this with the insights of another philosopher Mark Coeckelbergh in his new book “Digital Technologies, Temporality, and the Politics of Co-Existence”, a mouthful, I know. Prof. Dr. Mark Coeckelbergh is a full Professor of Philosophy of Media and Technology at the Philosophy of Department of the University of Vienna.
In this book, Coeckelbergh makes a plea for process philosophy:
“Process philosophy shows a way out of what is today seen as overly deterministic thinking about technology and time, and clears the road for thinking about digital technologies and digital selves not as objects but as processes and becoming“
He also introduces the concepts of embodied technologies and “technoperformances.”
Performances emphasize the role of humans and the social but also bodily and kinetic character of our (co-)existence with digital technologies… As I have proposed in Moved by Machines and related work, the term performance can be used to conceptualize our dealings with technologies, including digital technologies. As we use digital technologies and are involved in technoperformances, we move and are choreographed, we act and are directed. To conceptualize the important role technologies and media play, we can say that we do not only use technologies in order to move, but that technologies also move us and direct us. The medium is not only the message but also the performance.
Andreea passionately talks about the potential of XR to instigate and discover emergent behaviours, about rubbery environments in continuous change, putting change at the heart of everything. And also about performance, like in art performance, a live creative process that takes you on an embodied, visceral journey with direct interaction with public. A process relational approach: me and the building (the environment) going dancing for a while. Love that – dancing with your spacial environment: where the end result is less important than the process, the experience itself.
Ken Bye has btw very deep thoughts about the impact of AR/VR/XR on presence, immersive storytelling, and experiential design. Watch his May 2022 Brussels talk on YouTube here. I encourage you to watch the whole thing, it will reset your assumptions about virtual reality.
The core of his talk is about this quadrant, looking at AR/VR/XR in terms of four types of presences.
One could also say the four types of “illusions” of what is real and what creates and influences your learnings and behaviors.
“Apple DID debut a killer app. It’s embodied interaction *done well*. It doesn’t matter how simple it is. Experiencing space smoothlessly react to you in any form is exhilarating, addictive magic. The killer app is spatial UX as its own content. The novelty resides at the neural level, where a tiny delay or flicker makes a world of difference in how information is processed, and when and how the feeling of magic and awe is released.”
Besides the fact that the Vision Pro and anything related to it is just a gorgeous piece of technological perfection – “you can lick it” would Steve Jobs say – it deeply integrates spacial vision and embodied experience. That’s why I belief Apple just upgraded the illusion.
Update: I added a link to @BrettKing’s The Futurist Podcast on the Apple Vision Pro with @missmetaverse @Scobleizer, and @BrianRoemmele . This Podcast gives you a really good sense of the revolutionary aspects of the Apple Vision Pro. Enjoy!
About memory, and more specifically memory by space. Imagine how we could improve memory in interactive virtual spaces. By Kei Kreutler.
If you can’t get enough of these and want more, you can hang on to the firehose, the extended version of Petervan’s Delicacies in REVUE with loads of videos. Subscribe here: https://www.getrevue.co/profile/petervan
As usual, an incoherent, irregular, unpredictable collection of interesting sparks. Handpicked, no robots. Minimalism in curation. There is a shitload of new stuff this month. I tried to be extra disciplined and clean out the obvious, and what you’ve probably already seen elsewhere. Spread the word. Enjoy!
If you can’t get enough of these and want more, you can hang on to the firehose, the extended version of Petervan’s Delicacies in REVUE. Also in this edition with loads of videos. Subscribe here: https://www.getrevue.co/profile/petervan
Let’s try something new here: a “mood-scape”, documenting a personal mood/world using words, visuals, and sound. And inviting you to build new worlds by participating on a 1-1 basis. Although “new” is relative: the term moodscape was initially coined in the seventies, and mixing media can hardly be labeled new or novel. But having a “calm” conversation may sound like an anachronism in these times where time itself is collapsing, where time itself has become exponential.
I immediately fell in love with the melancholic, nostalgic, slow pace sound of the album, in my opinion, a perfect soundscape for the disorienting times we live in. There is some sort of homesickness here, knowing deep inside that we have already said goodbye to a golden era, and era that I sometimes refer to as the Bowie-Era.
I added a couple of Clockdust songs to my Spotify March 2020 Ride playlist, and one of the songs happened to sit next to David Bowie’s Lazarus song from his Blackstar album. To make a long story short, I created a sub-set of the playlist, containing the songs that I felt best reflected my March 2020 “Mood”. There is one coming for April as well 😉
I suggest you let it play in the background in shuffle-mode whilst reading this blog post, as I believe it may augment what I am trying to share.
The cover is a picture from Oskar Schlemmer’s Triadisches Ballett (Triadic Ballet), a choreography with costumed actors transformed into geometrical representations of the human body.
There is also this wonderful video testimony of one of the early performances of that choreography
The video sent me back in time – clockdust time – when I was a 6-year old schoolboy. For the very first time in my life, I stood – proudly – in front of a huge whiteboard in the classroom – it was a blackboard with white chalk – and we were invited by the teacher to properly write the letters of the alphabet with white chalk on this blackboard.
It must have been my early creative juices, but I could not withhold myself drawing big white spirals instead of well-formed a’s and b’s, etc. on that black-black blackboard. Result: punishment and the lesson learned that a classroom is not a place for creativity and imagination.
In vain, the seeds were sown, and spirals, spheres, labyrinths, maps, and foams became – with hindsight – an obsession. I love the endlessness, and the recursiveness of these shapes and forms. Especially double, entangled spirals or labyrinths get me going…
This high-end Balenciaga Summer 2020 production, with music from BFRND, is a perfect timestamp of our times. Grim black coats, at times almost German SS uniform like Arial race,… our sleepwalking into fascism. One thinks The Matrix, hard as stone, sharp as a knife, and greyed out faces. Will we take the Red or Blue pill? Blue for sure is the backdrop for what Balenciaga call “Power Dressing”.
Balenciaga Summer 20 reimagines dressing for work: power dressing, no matter what one does as a job. Looks transform a wearer in the way a uniform can. Unlike their archetypes, though, garments and accessories are made using unconventional processes.
They talk about New Fashion Uniforms, Seamless Tailoring, New Trompe L’oeil, Super Plissé, Pillow Parkas, Fetish Gownsn, and Wearable Ballroom dresses.
Models of various career tracks interpret and play on beauty standards of today, the past, and the future.
Enter Masks, a new book by James Curcio, about Bowie and other artists of artifice. I spotted the book in a guest post by James Curcio on Ribbonfarm’s always excellent blog.
The difference between a king and a beggar, a soldier and a murderer remains in the realm of performance, a kind of farcical mummers trick that we agree to play along with, if often unconsciously.
The bulk of the book is about Bowie’s unique conceptual art, his capability to create new coherent worlds and identities. I miss Bowie.
The post and book also refer to French philosopher Jean Baudrillard’s book Simulacra and Simulation, apparently required reading for the actors of The Matrix before filming. According to Wikipedia, Baudrillard is “best known for his analyses of media, contemporary culture, and technological communication, as well as his formulation of concepts such as simulation and hyperreality.”
It cannot be happenstance that I find a reference to Simulacra and Simulation in “Design Unbound”, fantastic two-volume work on “Designing for Emergence in a White Water World”, by John Seely Brown and Ann M. Pendleton-Jullian, a print-only MIT Press publication. Chapter 14 is about “World Building”: “much more than just the setting for a story, word building creates coherent contexts that stories become to inhabit”
This is very much avant-garde, feels a lot like Cobra world-building practices like New Babylon by Constant Nieuwenhuis.
I feel like I am drifting into a thin timeline, and time is slipping through my fingers like clockdust. A shaken gravity, with no reference framework, unable to make U-turns, and affront reality with an open mind, heart, and will.
I need a new backdrop, a new backstory to make or break sense. I want to liberate myself from the harness of fixed time and space. An opening-up that leads to more vulnerability – and less power dress. With proximity, intimacy, and closeness – like the closeness and blissfulness that is evoked in “Two Sleepy People” in the March 2020 Mini-Ride.
In that sense, the from/to framing of before and after COVID-19 is misleading. I believe we have to start thinking of ourselves as analog/digital assets whose state is updated in real-time ànd asynchronously, our lives continuously evolving through space and time. We are indeed astronauts, in need of coherent world-building and navigating clockdust till eternity.
I have time. You have time. Both clock-time (Chronos) and experienced-time (Kairos). Ping me if you want to continue the conversation. I’d love to hear where your clockdust has settled these days.
The “collapse of time” was an important meme in the Techonomy 2019 session on Super-Evolution, the idea that startups can now harness rapid prototyping and vast pools of data to develop radically new business models quickly and at scale (video here)
Super-Evolution is about creating more – dramatically more – options. Invented by AI, aka non-human logic. (see also Haydn Shaughnessy on the importance of maximizing options and radical adjacencies vs. core competency in innovation)
“Leave behind the myth of the grand plan and create the conditions for optionality and just-in-time strategy.”(Haydn Shaughnessy)
The first time I felt that sensation of collapsing time was when viewing Elon Musk’s Tesla 2019 update. I felt beaten by algorithms. The Tesla is now/then learning from (data) from human behavior and driving like a human, but ultimately will EXCEED their behavior” (at 01:48:15)
There you have it: gradually, but suddenly we have a singularity. Gradually but suddenly, all jobs are doomed. We are not going to stop this with an ethics council or with regulation. The train has left the station, the genie is out of the bottle.
“Elon Musk forces us to be of two minds. On one side, we have Musk the Mountebank; on the other, a Captain of Industry.”
I had the same feeling of time-space collapse and irrelevance when watching this awesome interview with Rahul Sonnad, CEO/Co-Founder of Tesloop, explaining how “Robo-Mobility is a hospitality service” and “Once cars are appliances”
Are we toast? And/or do we need to reboot, reskill, etc if we don’t want to become irrelevant? Venkatesh Rao gives his perspective when reflecting on Inventing Time, and playing on Alan Kay’s “It is easier to invent the future than to predict it” and William Gibson’s “The future is already here, it is just unevenly distributed.”
“Riding in a Tesla made the electric vehicle future seem utterly inevitable in a way that kinda killed the present for me. Suddenly I could no longer look at gasoline cars the same way. Driving in my own car felt different like I was stuck in the past, waiting for the price of the future to come down to the point where I could afford to live in it. So a Tesla creates the future in the sense of both the Alan Kay and William Gibson quotes. It makes the future real in a deep way that is like making time itself real. And you know this because the feel of the present feels different like you’re heading down a dead-end, a lame-duck future. You’ll have to either abandon it as soon as you can or end up dying with it.”
“Often map artworks recapitulate the narratives of rupture (spatial as well as temporal) through which global modernity differentiates itself from inherited pasts and surroundings.”
And;
“Maps have proven integral… to the experience of “time-space compression”
It is probably a sign of the times that in the preparation of his new book “Agency” also the great William Gibson lost a sense of how weird the world has become, up to the point of the present bypassing his future sci-fi scripts – “His future had to catch up with the present”– and “stubs”: alternative timeline in which technologists (and, more tellingly, hobbyists) of the future are able to meddle.
Hobbyists and meddling, the right words probably for not getting alienated. I would call it “tinkering” by maximizing options that human logic not necessary can spot or generate in time.
Another rabbit hole bringing together some reflections on creativity, demolition, patrimony, and poetic ruination, as so often in this blog inspired by architectural insights and metaphors.
My attention was triggered by an article in the Jan 11, 2020 weekend edition of De Standaard, a Flemish newspaper. The article was about landscaping, and more specifically “ontharding” (I would literally translate it as “softening”). In this case, softening that what was hardened in the first place. Abandoned and neglected residential and industrial sites, where the soil is still covered by the concrete and rubbish of empty buildings.
It was part of a study supported by the “Vlaamse Bouwmeester”. “Bouwmeester” means “master of building”, “bau-meister”. The term is ill-translated into “Flemish Government Architect” on the official website. The full study can be found here (PDF in Dutch).
The core mission of the Flemish Government Architect is to promote the architectural quality of the built environment. The Flemish Government Architect and his team advise public patrons in the design and realization of buildings, public space, landscape and infrastructure. In addition, the Flemish Government Architect stimulates the development of visions and reflection, with an emphasis on interdisciplinary and cross-sectoral initiatives. The Flemish Government Architect acts as an advisor to the entire Flemish Government.
In short, the article and the study plea for restoring public space by the demolition of 1/5th of hardened space/surface in the Flemish landscape by 2050.
I had a flashback to “Cradle to Cradle”, the 2002 book that alerted me for the first time to a possible vision of sustainable production and architecture. The idea at that time was that reducing waste was just not good enough, and to be sustainable we needed to add value back into the system. As an evolution, the article about the softening of landscape goes one step further: from reducing waste to creating open space by the demolition of vacancy.
“Sloop geeft blijk van falen” – “Demolition evidences failure”
Dan Hill was/is looking for (open) spaces as well, quoting ex-FC Barcelona football player and current Al-Sadd (Quatar) football team coach Xavi Hernández:
“Think quickly, look for spaces. That’s what I do: look for spaces. All day. I’m always looking. All day, all day. Here? No. There? No. People who haven’t played don’t always realise how hard that is. Space, space, space. It’s like being on the PlayStation. I think ‘shit, the defender’s here, play it there’. I see the space and pass. That’s what I do.”
Already more than 20 years ago, architect Cedric Price was arguing for demolish-able buildings with open re-usable spaces.
Cedric Price’s Fun Palace – inspiration for Centre Pompidou in Paris
OK – I confess – as from that moment I went down the rabbit hole and saw demolition and abandoned architecture everywhere. Like in this recent Guardian article, arguing the case for fully demountable buildings.
“We have to think of buildings as material depots,” says Thomas Rau , a Dutch architect who has been working to develop a public database of materials in existing buildings and their potential for reuse… He has developed the concept of “material passports”, a digital record of the specific characteristics and value of every material in a construction project, thereby enabling the different parts to be recovered, recycled and reused.
But there is also something poetic about abandonment, up to the point where we could consider keeping these ruins and equipping them with sensors to listen to patrimony.
Like menhirs, these abandoned seismic sensors could now just stand there, silent in the landscape, awaiting a future photographer such as Grigoryants to capture their poetic ruination.
Lebbeus Woods was inspiration to Geoff Manough and London-based architects Smout Allen for the project L.A. Recalculated:
Woods depicts an entire city designed and built as an inhabitable scientific tool. Everywhere there are “oscilloscopes, refractors, seismometers, interferometers, and other, as yet unknown instruments, measuring light, movement, force, change.” Woods describes how “tools for extending perceptivity to all scales of nature are built spontaneously, playfully, experimentally, continuously modified in home laboratories, in laboratories that are homes.”
Instead of wasting their lives tweeting about celebrity deaths, residents construct and model their own bespoke experiments, exploring seismology, astronomy, electricity, even light itself.
Seismic Counterweights
From L.A. Recalculated by Smout Allen and BLDGBLOG
Like architects think about (industrial) sites listening through sensors to seismic undercurrents, I started wondering whether we could not use this metaphor to reflect about our organizational structures; structures not only as hierarchical structures but the more encompassing set of system rules and patterns of an organization – I referred to it before as organizational patrimony.
How can we listen to and signal about the pulse of this organizational patrimony? How can we be aware of it, appreciate it, respect it, and build upon it in our rebellious acts of creative destruction?
I imagine a cohort of humans – like a colony of ants – having 24/7 sensors and laboratories everywhere in organizations; in every office, cubicle, meeting room, coffee corner, etc. And I don’t mean robotic sterile sensors feeding AI models. I mean real humans, measuring, documenting and signaling patrimonial changes in the structure of corporate structure, so they can send early warnings of experiments that have become useless and therefore have to be ruinated, or – in the worst-case – signal cases of patrimonial breakdown and demolition. In search of the material depot and passport of our organizations.
During my visit to SFMOMA on 15 Nov 2019, I was standing on the terrace of the 7th Floor looking North-East into Natoma Street, and wondering what the curved-walled building on the left was about.
I did not pay much attention until I was reminded of this view in this article about floating utopias in The New-Yorker of 11 Dec 2019. Below is a view from the other side, probably taken from the Providian Financial rooftop on Beale Street, looking South-West. At the far end, you may recognize the SFMOMA building. The building in the front is Salesforce Park, a lush rooftop arcadia of rolling meadows.
Salesforce Park.Photograph by Karl Mondon / The Mercury News / Getty
The article in The New-Yorker is about the utopian, surveilled and orchestrated architecture in the middle of the astonishing inequality of homeless people in all the other streets of San Francisco:
Taxpayer-funded, corporately branded, suspended above the homeless, the park is an irresistible metaphor for the city’s socioeconomic tensions. It also feels like a bid, or a prayer, for a certain vision of its future.
Salesforce Park as a model for the rest of San Francisco—vertical, expansive, ecologically minded, expensive, sponsored, and surveilled.
“I feel totally orchestrated,” Cranz said, placing her hand on the railing separating us from the plant life. “I’m acutely aware of how managed everything is.”
Two days later, I bumped on-line into the magical world of the Dutch artist Constant Nieuwenhuis and especially his Magnus opus “New Babylon”, another utopia, a city designed to respond to Homo Ludens’ need for playing, for adventure, and for mobility.
In New Babylon there are no single houses
The whole city is one immense covered collective house
A house with countless rooms, halls and corridors,
In which one can roam for days or weeks,
But where one can also find
Small spaces for privacy
New Babylon is a labyrinth
Inexhaustible in its variations
A palace with a thousand rooms
Constant was one of the founders of Cobra, an avant-garde art movement established on 8 Nov 1948. The movement only existed for three years, but forever changed the landscape of postwar European art. Cobra was perhaps the last avant-garde movement of the twentieth century. Constant was the author and co-signee of the initial COBRA Manifesto “La Cause était entendue” – “The Case was Settled”.
Les représentants belges, danois et hollandais à la conférence du Centre Internatiopnal de Documentation sur l’Art d’Avant-Garde à Paris jugent que celle-ci n’a mené à rien.
La résolution qui a été votée à la séance de cloture ne fait qu’exprimer le manque total d’un accord suffisant pour justifier le fait même de la réunion.
Nous voyons comme le seul chemin pour continuer l’activité internationale une collaboration organique expérimentale qui évite toute théorie stérile et dogmatique.
Aussi décidons-nous de ne plus assister aux conférences dont le programme et l’atmosphère ne sont pas favorable à un développement de notre travail.
Nous avons pu constater, nous, que nos façons de vivre, de travailler, de sentir étaient communes ; nous nous entendons sur le plan pratique et nous refusons de nous embrigader dans une unité théorique artificielle. Nous travaillons ensemble, nous travaillerons ensemble.
C’est dans un esprit d’efficacité que nous ajoutons à nos expériences nationales une expérience dialectique entre nos groupes. Si, actuellement, nous ne voyons pas ailleurs qu’entre nous d’activité internationale, nous faisons appel cependant aux artistes de n’importe quel pays qui puissent travailler – qui puissent travailler dans notre sens.
After reading “Homo Ludens – A Study of the Play-Element in Culture” by Johan Huizinga, Constant develops the idea for a futuristic city. He develops this idea by drawing maps, writing texts, building constructions, and models.
Constant worked for almost 20 years on New Babylon (1959-1974). Today, there is a foundation to preserve and promote the art collection and intellectual legacy of the artist.
From Wikipedia:
The goal was the creating of alternative life experiences, called ‘situations’
Perched above ground, Constant’s megastructures would literally leave the bourgeois metropolis below and would be populated by homo ludens–man at play.
In the New Babylon, the bourgeois shackles of work, family life, and civic responsibility would be discarded. The post-revolutionary individual would wander from one leisure environment to another in search of new sensations. Beholden to no one, he would sleep, eat, recreate, and procreate where and when he wanted. Self-fulfillment and self-satisfaction were Constant’s social goals. Deductive reasoning, goal-oriented production, the construction and betterment of a political community–all these were eschewed.
It is obvious that a person free to use his time for the whole of his life, free to go where he wants, when he wants, cannot make the greatest use of his freedom in a world ruled by the clock and the imperative of a fixed abode. As a way of life Homo Ludens will demand, firstly, that he responds to his need for playing, for adventure, for mobility, as well as all the conditions that facilitate the free creation of his own life.
Some of the constructs in Constant’s vision reminded me of the sketches and models of Buckminster Fuller’s Dimaxyon House of 30 years earlier).
Buckminster Fuller, Dimaxyon House, Chicago, USA, 1927
Constant passes away in Utrecht on August 1st, 2005, at home with his wife Trudy van der Horst. He is buried at Zorgvlied in Amstelveen on August 6th. On his grave:
In art freedom manifests itself in its highest form. The creative imagination. Art creates an image of the world that didn’t exist before. No. More than that. An image that was unthinkable before.
I’d love to see a 21st-century version of Cobra, a collective of artists, thinkers, creators, tinkerers, and experimentalists, leading into a movement of fresh thinking. Not necessarily and exclusively an art-movement, but an all-encompassing societal-movement, with more time and air and oxygen for our children to play, where they naturally can grow into what they are best at, with a renewed freshness and renaissance, a new corporate and societal spring, celebrating the power of imagination and creativity, as a response to our dull political landscape of non-zero games.
A new New Babylon, a new city to play, a new avant-garde propelling us into the highest forms of freedom.
The theme for Techonomy 2019 in Half Moon Bay, California was “Reset and Restore: Governing Tech, Retrieving Ethics, and Acting on Climate.”
In the opening session, Founder and Host David Kirkpatrick prompted: “These are serious times” and the following interview by Andrew Keen of David was really interesting. Keen rightfully asked the question of what needs to be reset, and – if we have to restore something – is this a nostalgic going back to good old times, or what is meant here?
To make a long story short, it seemed the answer could be distilled to a resetting and restoring back to/towards more humanity.
Konstantinos Karachalios, Managing Director of IEEE’s Digital Ethics department referred to the German Jewish Viennese philosopher Gunther Anders, who wrote in 1956 “The outdatedness of the Human Species”.
Konstantinos also shared some strong opinions about the Power (in)equation – the asymmetry in power of the big tech vs. us – and summarized his thinking as “The Time of (Engineering) Innocence is Over”
Colin Parris @colin_j_paris did a session titled “Why AI has to be humble” about GE’s use of self-learning AI in the building of GE Jet Engines. Super-slick and professional presentation, almost too clinical. The last slide was about “Intimidation by Immortal Machines”.
Let me put all this behind the backdrop of what I saw and experienced a couple of days earlier in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA).
Richard Moss "INCOMING" - Picture by Petervan
On the 7th floor, there is an amazing video installation by Richard Mosse, called “INCOMING”, and it is about the horrible conditions in another Western export product: refugee camps, and related issues of sovereignty, warfare, and surveillance. The installation forces us to confront our own complicity. Strongly recommended. Still running in SFMOMA till 17 Feb 2020. Warning: you won’t come out smiling from this installation!
The entrance of the installation also includes a picture of Berlin’s Tempelhof, a symbolically loaded site to house asylum seekers.
“…, and the airfield has been transformed into a popular public park. Some of its adjacent buildings and territory were designated as an emergency refugee shelter in 2015”
What misery! What a shame for a “modern” society! This installation made me rethink my opinion about refugees. For me, it questions the whole semantic discussion about “asylum seekers” vs. “economic” refugees. There is no difference. When people become so desperate to flee their home and take these incredible risks and withstand these inhumane circumstances, those semantics become irrelevant.
This injustice is going to explode in our face, sooner or later. A toxic mix with climate change, inequality and the 1% owning 99% of the wealth. I can only hope I will not be treated this way when I or my children have to find refuge for climate change or other disasters in the future.
All the big problems of today are crying for more compassion, more morality, less greed. The root cause is a lack of morals combined with an abundance of greed.
Putting it all together, “Immortal Machines of Loving Grace” may be better replaced by “Immoral Machines of Loving Greed”. Just replacing two words is probably better and more adequately describing our Zeitgeist.
In that sense, some of the discussions of Techonomy 2019 should have included the refugee crisis vs. having safe conversations about the attention economy, tech supremacy or immortal machines of loving grace in a five-star luxury hotel.
Mid November 2019, I was once more lucky enough to attend the 9th edition of Techonomy, in my opinion, one of the best tech conferences and networking events in the world.
The event is set up as a three-day retreat at The Ritz-Carlton on the shores of Half Moon Bay, CA. The format is pretty straightforward: many fireside chats, some presentations, and some early morning workshops. Content leads and is focused on tech, business, and social progress. Full program here. All live video streams here.
The theme for Techonomy 2019 was “Reset and Restore: Governing Tech, Retrieving Ethics, and Acting on Climate” with an awesome list of speakers and instigators.
Here is – in more or less random order – a set of tweetable memes that I collected at #Techonomy19:
Can technology help us listen vs. sharing/shouting?
From giving fish > learn to fish > create fishing schools
Only the Walmarts can save us from Trump
by addressing the root cause of big problems such as healthcare
The hierarchy not always wins
There has to be some kind of return (on investment). Why?
Real-Time Crime Solving vs. Real-Time Health Development
Real-Time Evil Control vs. Real-Time Good Amplification
5G Beam Forming
Precision Economy
Computing moving back to the edge
Trust is consistency over time
Transparency vs. Clarity
Your digital twin is not you real me; it is just a model of me
All companies are connection machines
I will not work on fully autonomous weapons
Voice First
The Time of Engineering Innocence is Over
Privacy is Dead vs. Anonymity is Dead
The Absolute does not Exist
Worry and Concern are two different things
The State (country) is done
Welcome a future of 2,000 “Nations” aka Superminds
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