Petervan Delicacies #165 - Dec 2023

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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.

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.

I am now reviving Delicacies on Substack. It’s a bit more work to do the curation, especially more discipline and focus.

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The very best

• About the Meta-Crises and Digital Identity - by Jordan Hall

• About drawing The Line against fascism - by Professor Galloway

• About creating authenticity in a synthetic world of systemic confusion - Welcome to the synthetic universe - by Tim Leberecht

• Regretful Accelerationism - by Ben Thompson

Data & Society

• This interactive dashboard encourages users to focus on one area – a country, region, or income level – and see how it compares to its counterparts across a wide range of metrics

• An Empowering City is an evolution of the Smart city which empower all the residents rather than just being used to city services - by Bob Frankston. Interesting note: Bob goes a long way, he was the co-inventor of… VisiCalc!

• Amazon sells a spy camera disguised as a towel hook: what could possibly go wrong?

Innovation

• How to organise yourself for change - about Explorers, Villagers, and Town Planners - Part-1 - Magic from Simon Wardley

In all other circumstances, keep whatever organisational structure you have “as is” because nobody enjoys a re-organisation except leaders who want to feel they are doing something and management consultants who get paid for it. Leave the org alone.

FinTech, crypto and other distortions

• JP Morgan CEO has again slammed crypto and Bitcoin, saying he'd "close it down" if he were in charge of making laws.

AI, Robots, Algorithms

• The four levels of AI: Steps to Self-Evolution - by Nova Spivack

• About Artificial Bullshit - And then a real discussion of AI safety, speed, and governance - by Jeff Jarvis

• The Self-Operating computer emerges: “lets the AI control both the mouse where it clicks and all the keyboard triggers essentially. It’s like an agent like autoGPT except it’s not text based. It’s vision based so it takes a screenshot of the computer and then it decides mouse clicks and keyboards, exactly like a person would.”

• Google Gemini AI demo (mockup for some parts, but hey!)

• Modern AI puts us firmly into an age of exploration of computational reality - Great post and absolute brain melt by Venkatesh Rao

• AI and Trust - some important reflections by Bruce Schneier

In this talk, I am going to make several arguments. One, that there are two different kinds of trust—interpersonal trust and social trust—and that we regularly confuse them. Two, that the confusion will increase with artificial intelligence. We will make a fundamental category error. We will think of AIs as friends when they’re really just services. Three, that the corporations controlling AI systems will take advantage of our confusion to take advantage of us. They will not be trustworthy. And four, that it is the role of government to create trust in society. And therefore, it is their role to create an environment for trustworthy AI. And that means regulation. Not regulating AI, but regulating the organizations that control and use AI.

Digital Ethics

• The Internet Enabled Mass Surveillance. A.I. Will Enable Mass Spying - by Bruce Schneier

• Visually stunning film about the dangers of AI – made by AI

Post Capitalism

• About the City of Praxis, another libertarian city, this time in the Mediterranean. Not sure we need more of this.

Art related

• Playing with AI, and adding progressively more intense images - by Rene Walker

• Marcel Duchamp used doors as exhibition devices in the 1938 Exposition internationale du surréalisme - via Greg Allen

• The e-Flux Index - a publication for artists and curators. Very inspiring.

• 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.

• Screenwalk with Chia Amisola. This is a “screen performance”. Love the idea. I am following Chia for a while now, and I love how she uses poetry, minimalistic technologies, and audioscapes to share her insights and vulnerabilities. Check out her website and her blog. Below a link to the Twitch recording of her performance.

Aesthetics

• A short animated documentary by Eryk Salvaggio on how AI image generation works, and the entanglement of composite photography, statistical correlations, and racist ideologies. Warning: This video contains fast-cut images that some have compared to a strobe effect.

• Random Studio: a spatial listening experience for Bottega Veneta

• Songs from the Compost by Eglė Budvytytė, addressing human and non-human vulnerability, individualism, power and control

Music/Sound

• Petervan’s Musical Ride - December 2023

Books/Publications

• If you like William Gibson, here are Rudy Rucker’s notes and highlights from Gibson’s “Spawl Trilogy”: Neuromancer, Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive. With some beautiful surrealistic illustrations. Long very enjoyable read.

• And while we are at it, I was reading Gibson’s latest book “Agency”, which lead me to Mark Neale’s Gibson documentary from October 2000. They don’t make this sort of documentaries anymore…

For real nerds

• Not digital, but analog DJ’ing with modified turntables - via Good Internet