🖇️✨The Nexialist #0194

collective consciousness | back to the office? | birds of a feather | lessons in birdwatching | vectors of intelligence | whisperverse | hallucinationship | tocotó | if i died tomorrow | witte flits

Oct 10, 2024

welcome to my weekly cyber-psycographing gig, the nexialist

hey, you! i hope the brainsparks today feel similar to the gif above. maybe i got a bit experimental with my wonderings in this nexialist, but bear with me (as you usually do, i guess). this week, the ai world summit is happening in amsterdam and i had the privilege of going with the city of amsterdam team, together with envisioning.

i usually go to conferences on a mission to watch as many interesting talks as i can and get those slides to share here. this year, however, it ended up being about meeting people and learning about the digital/AI efforts of the city of amsterdam. it was great to see that city planners are discussing and reflecting on how to use (or not use) artificial intelligence, considering its social impact, while also exchanging and coordinating with other cities in europe. when they publish their AI vision, i will share it here for sure.

but for today, get ready for links about love, work, intelligence and death. enjoy! 🫀✨

—Rodrigo Turra

1 year ago » 🦈✨The Nexialist #0142 : 90s bands alignment chart | world built on pain | designed to depress | dangerous beauty | blockbuster template

Buy Me a Coffee? ☕️

✨collective consciousness

@kittylever COLLECTIVE CONCIOUSNESS - a sociological concept that describes the shared beliefs, ideas, and attitudes that bind people together in a society. when i see a similar project come out at the same time as another, its such an affirming feeling. i always say, if you dont execute an idea….. it will come out of the collective some way or another… magic ✨🙏🏼

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last week i wrapped up the nexialist talking about swarm intelligence because of christos papadopoulos’ ties unseen dance piece for ndt (tn#193). well, on the very same day, kettylever’s video reached me. she brings another perspective to when we findin people doing similar work to yours (in this case, big fashion brands): maybe you’re just tapping into the collective consciousness. at first, i was thinking she was being naïve, because of course there have been cases where work is copied and plagiarized from artists. her examples, however, do have a synchronization factor. and according to her, it just brings more abundance of ideas and connection to what’s happening. i like that perspective.

brainsparks: scenius aka communal genius (tn#31), architecture of the invisible (tn#193), the hidden networks of everything (tn#126), art predicts (tn#1), collective intelligence (tn#179)

🖇️back to the office?

i’ve been loving yseult’s new album, and this video appeared to me recently, from around 4 months ago. i couldn’t help but think how timely it is that we are seeing these videos in the office in a few months window (like fka twig’s eusexua and billie’s new video, below).

at first, it slightly bothered me, as if it was a coordinated movement from big tech to make offices look cool, as part of their campaign to end hybrid work and get people back to the office. but looking closer in these 3 videos, it’s quite the opposite: they show how inhospitable (or lonely?) office life can be. a mockery to office work (or at least its stereotype).

brainsparks: suic*de (tn#192), eusexua (tn#191), office aesthetics (tn#59)

🪶birds of a feather

well, here is billie at the office. this video is a bit more nuanced: she is alone without office chaos. but as much as this is a love song, it is a song about the love+death combo. “i want you to stay, til i’m in the grave” are the first two verses. so maybe the office is a limbo, where you get stuck.

i also just learned the “birds of a feather flock together”, after this song’s release actually. “said about people who have similar characters or interests, especially ones of which you disapprove, and who often spend time with each other.”

brainsparks: imaginal disk (tn#188), dyke camp (tn#24)

🦜lessons in birdwatching

Michell Zappa

shared on his

Artificial Insights

newsletter quite an interesting thought about the birds visiting his backyard since he added a bird feeder, connecting it with artificial superintelligence. the slide above is from his presentation he recently showed at the trendwatching event, and i love how it uses different symbiotic relationships from nature to ask how we want to relate/develop our AIs.

From the birds' perspective, it's an easy win, and word spreads quickly among the feathered when good food is to be found.
Symbiosis. There are many ways to coexist. We interact with countless species through indirect experience. We are vastly more intelligent than most of these and have exploited that difference to our collective advantage throughout history. We have contained nature and made it obey our will. This feels obvious, yet difficult to see.
I am not suggesting future superintelligences will lure us in with free food for their delight.
I have no reason to believe they will act with benevolence.
Why would they?

brainsparks: centaur mindset (tn#106), ask nature (tn#86), tech radar (tn#177)

🧠vectors of intelligence

this diagram gave me so many brainsparks. it was also part of

Michell Zappa

’s presentation (but my photo was blurry, so i found this version from joscha bach’s class). cognitive scientist joscha bach’s vectors of intelligence is a way to measure/evaluate intelligent systems from different perspectives, from task specific to general, which is a way to say we have not yet reached artificial general intelligence. the vectors are: perception, reasoning, learning, representation, knowledge, language, collaboration, autonomy and embodiment. i think it’s a nice framework to understand the current systems are quite good at some things, but not at everything. at least for now.

brainspark: natural intelligence (tn#168), erotic intelligence (tn#1)

👾the whisperverse

this link was shared at the

Artificial Insights

group and it immediately caught me. the image is genious, and the whisperverse term made me click. such a black mirror way to start the conversation.

The "Whisperverse": The future of mobile computing is an AI voice inside your head by Louis Rosenberg. while he personifies this merging of technologies, i think we are already seeing ai suggesting us a lot of content and helping with decision making.

This future is the result of two technologies maturing and merging into one: artificial intelligence and augmented reality. Their combination will enable AI assistants to ride shotgun in our lives, observing our world and giving us advice so useful that we’ll quickly feel like we can’t live without it. Of course, there are serious privacy concerns, not to mention the risk of AI-powered persuasion and manipulation, but what choice will we have? When big tech starts selling superpowers, not having these abilities will mean being at a disadvantage socially, professionally, economically, and intellectually.

brainsparks: addictive intelligence (tn#186), deep doubt era (tn#193), angel of my dreams (tn#183), scientists going into your dreams (tn#13)

🍄hallucinationship

when a situationship merges with delulu, we get a hallucinationship. i cackled with this neologism, and while it is applied to humans, we better be careful not to have those with our machines (and the corporations who create them).

brainsparks: the state of dating (tn#191), new words for new worlds (tn#111), personal machines and portable worlds (tn#132), situationships (tn#86), shifting realities (tn#176), relationship anarchy (tn#6)

🐎tocotó

i love the imagery in amaia’s new vertical video for tocotó, her super cute tune i’m in love with. i mean, the slides and the people endlessly running/scrolling is quite a powerful image. also the lyrics are simple and effective: she starts the song singing for her horse to run faster, and ends to song realizing there is not even a race. while she meditates in the video.

brainsparks: sexo en la playa (tn#126), an apocalyptic meditation on doomscrolling (tn#145), boonscrolling (tn#91), infoxication (tn#96), content diet (tn#2)

🪦if i died tomorrow

rigoberta bandini’s new song puts together so many emotions in one track: i was curious, then smiling, then crying, than laughing while crying. i don’t think many artists can do this. in “if i died tomorrow” she starts listing the cute things she would would if she would die tomorrow, then she angrily cries to god in a parking lot: “how do you do this to me, you bastard?” only to find out she this was a lie she made up in her head, leaving us inspired to live our lives, do that master’s degree, live 400 years, stop with absurd fears and eat those churros. genius!

brainsparks: emotional plurality (tn#15), babooshka (tn#155), soledad (tn#41)

😭witte flits

last weekend i went with juan and andrea to watch this beautiful dutch movie directed by laura hermanides: witte flits, white flash in english. it’s a movie based on real story of a young man who had several mental diagnostics which he couldn’t cure, which brought him immesurable suffering. he applied for euthanasia, which is legal in the netherlands.

the movie is about this process for him and for his family. while the movie is quite touching, it’s also quite educational to learn how the process works. i was crying drool and snot by the end of it, as we say in portuguese, chorando baba e ranho.

brainsparks: duelo (tn#188), everybody dies (tn#37)

see you next week, birdies 🦜✨

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