⛔️✨The Nexialist #0168

artificial intimacy | risk-aversion | vicarious | risk zones in ethical operating systems | natural intelligence | metereopático | batidão tropical vol.2 | alter ego

Apr 11, 2024

welcome to your weekly batch of wonderings and reveries, the nexialist

hey, you! i hope this e-zine finds you curious, or at least bored. maybe this week’s edition can help you with that. i will keep the intro short for today as there is quite a lot to read below. enjoy! 🫀✨

—Rodrigo Turra

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🫂the new a.i. - artificial intimacy

recently i started catching up on eshter perel’s podcast where should we begin, thanks to my boyfriend, juan, and this talk from sxsw came up. esther perel first brought “artificial intimacy” to her talk last year at sxsw, when someone trained an ai on her podcasts and posts and claimed to have created esther perel’s ai. it’s super powerful to see her and brené brown together talking about this and many other issues related to vulnerability, loneliness, relationships and this is all mediated by technology.

Artificial intimacy is all the experiences that we currently have that are pseudo experiences. They should give us the feeling of something real, but they don't. I am talking to you about something deeply personal, and you're answering me, uh huh, uh huh. And I should be feeling connected, open, vulnerable, you know, but in fact you're there but you're not present and I'm feeling a certain kind of loneliness.…It's not the loneliness of being alone. It's the loneliness of being with people next to whom you should not be feeling lonely, but in fact you do. That's AI. My AI, my emotional AI, is the consequence of living in a contactless world where there is very, very little friction. Now, you know, I'm a, I'm a sex therapist too, so I believe in the importance of friction. It actually It makes, it makes for better sex, you know.

brainsparks: paradoxical relationships (tn#44), a frictionless world is boring as f*ck (tn#163)

🙅risk-aversion

this interview reminded me of how a frictionless world is boring as f*ck (tn#163)— and according to esther perel, results in this artificial intimacy and loneliness. it got me thinking: as we live in an increasingly seamless world, it also keeps us from experiencing uncomfortable situations, which is how we would learn how to deal with them.

digital natives, aka gen z, is the most risk-averse, and "perceive more dangers in life than previous generations” according to the society of risk analysis. of course, there’s a mental health crisis, a loneliness pandemic, eco anxiety, fear of being cancelled, growing inequality and unaffordable housing, and being chronically online doesn’t help. in fact it becomes a shield. i’m not gen z, but i can totally relate.

risk-aversion is killing romance for gen z. risk-aversion is killing science and innovation. i cannot not connect this to all the flattening of culture: the moodboard effect (tn#81), the vanishing designer (tn#81), the age of average (tn#115). this is where a frictionless world and a culture that doesn’t reward failure or daring to be different takes us to.

brainsparks: the moodboard effect (tn#81), the vanishing designer (tn#81), the age of average (tn#115)

📱vicarious

vicarious (adjective) | vye-KAIR-ee-us)
A vicarious emotion or experience is one felt by watching, hearing about, or reading about someone else rather than by doing something yourself.
// He felt a vicarious thrill as his daughter crossed the stage to accept her diploma.

i had heard this word before but had no clue what it meant. it came in my e-mail while writing this edition and it couldn’t be more fitting. while a vicarious experience can have quite a positive effect, like learning for other people’s (or character’s) mistakes, practicing empathy or even a kind of compersion (tn#14), when it becomes a way of living it can feed into this risk-aversion and become a problem.

i think about quite a lot: a lot of kids spend a lot of time watching ‘play with me’ videos instead of playing themselves. in my case, i watch creators doing things i would like to do but i’m paralyzed and i can’t do it. of course, i will not be able to do all the things i want, but i definitely think i could spend less time on the screen and more time doing things irl.

brainsparks: independence vs autonomy (tn#67)

⛔️risk zones in ethical operating systems

this framework created by the institute for the future was shared in the Artificial Insights community and i was so happy to see it. we’ve said before we have the tendency of naively equating technological advancement with progress, and i think this framework can help organizations, governments and civilians to also assess the risk and impact of a certain technologies.

it was released in 2019, and after reading it i realized there was something missing. do you also see it? well, there should be at least another slice. risk zone 9: environment and climate. to be fair, they’ve made a new version, organized as a playbook for ethical technology governance, which includes 5 zones and one of them is climate. but i think in this case being is more specific is quite helpful, so i would just add a ninth.

brainspark: critic of technology (tn#121), dopamine culture (tn#164), awesome anthropocene goals (tn#67), climate storytelling toolkit (tn#131)

🌍natural intelligence

Thomas Klaffke from Creative Destruction made a post about natural intelligence: “with all the hype and talk about Artificial Intelligence, I can’t stop imagining what would happen if we invested as much attention, time, and money into Natural Intelligence?!” he brings a few elements, such as the stewardship of indigenous communities, bioproductivity and regenerative agriculture, biomimicry and mutualism.

i like how he ends his piece inviting us to wonder what would the natural equivalent of the so sought after artificial general intelligence and superintelligence, and it’s a great exercise for our imagination (and hopefully action).

brainsparks: inner rewilding (tn#164), how to be a good ancestor (tn#18), amazonize the world (tn#74), indigenous futurism (tn#65), solarpunk (tn#97), more than human rights (tn#131)

⛈️metereopático

martaregistradaa

A post shared by @martaregistradaa

my sister gabriela sent this and i love it. spanish creator @martaregistradaa learns from her italian friend the term metereopático as a way to say the weather defines your mood. i am very much like that, but working on it, since the netherlands can be quite gray and wet.

doing a quick search i realized that this term varies in definition. metereopatía actually means that certain diseases or symptoms appear or get worse under certain meteorological conditions. the wikipedia entry in english, metereopathy, or weather pains, is quick to dismiss this, claiming no scientific proof of this. some spanish people said the term in spanish would be metereosensible which i also loved. in english i’ve heard terms like winter blues or seasonal affective disorder (sad) but this is more fixed to seasons and not a specific day’s weather.

brainsparks: emotional plurality (tn#15)

🏖️batidão tropical vol.2

our favorite drag queen, pabllo vittar, has released her new album, the part 2 of batidão tropical and again, we’re here for it. in this edition she features known artists and songs from the north/northeastern regions of brazil: forró, technobrega, technomelody. it’s pure joy, so stream now.

🐊alter ego

this is such a banger and i just couldn’t not share it with you. thank you dimas ( Música em Casa ) for sharing this. doechii is from tampa, florida and brought the swamps as a lifestyle. i don’t think i had seen this before and i’m in it. she’s even swamp princess on instagram.

we’re officially on our way to the swamp. if you’ve never been to the swamp, you should visit. it’s better than a resort, better than the spa, better than the city. and you can whatever the f*ck you want. there’s no laws.

see you next week, dear 🫀✨

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