Petervan Delicacies #176

March 2025 - May 2025

“Delicacies” is my incoherent, irregular, unpredictable collection of interesting sparks I came across online. Handpicked by a human, no robots, no AI. A form of tripping, wandering, dérivé, with some loosely undefined theme holding them together. Delicacies have no fixed frequency: I hit the publish button when there is enough material. That can be after a week, or after 3 months. No pressure, literally.

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The very best

• About the potential of building multi-agent teams of humans and AIs - By Mickey McManus

• About spiritual intelligence being eroded by technology - A floating signifier in a dead field - by Pascal Wicht

“Self-development becomes self-extraction.”

• Kevin Kelly on the handoff to robots > via Azeem

“Productivity is for robots. Humans should be doing the jobs where inefficiency reigns – art, exploration, invention, innovation, small talk, adventure, companionship. All the productive chores should be handled by the billions of AIs we make.”

• About Design and The Construction of Imaginaries > by Tobias Revell - Design Futures lead at Arup Foresight. Full transcript and slides here. About technology’s role in our imagination.

• Rudy and Isabel Rucker on the Time Ecosystem. I am such a huge fan of Rudy Rucker. Check out his books and posts. Very enjoyable.

“I am a science fiction writer and the secret of science fiction is pile on the bullshit and keep a straight face”

Data & Society

• About AI driving a dark surveillance state in the US. By Eryk Salvaggio

“This would be a new level of government surveillance, tying the tactics of surveillance capitalism to the punitive power of the US government. This is not a conspiracy theory, and to merit concern, no coordinated conspiracy needs to exist. The presence of the apparatus is a concern unto itself. With a court order restricting access to Treasury Department data rescinded this week, DOGE now has access to even more sensitive, private information about US Citizens.”

• About the false promise of transparency. Very good (as usual) by Cory Doctorow.

“Which is why privacy policies are actually privacy invasion policies. No one reads these things because we all know we disagree with every word in them, including “and” and “the.” They all boil down to, “By being stupid enough to use this service, you agree that I’m allowed to come to your house, punch your grandmother, wear your underwear, make long distance calls, and eat all the food in your fridge.”

Innovation

• About reclaiming the joy of dials and buttons > by Amber Case

“When we remove buttons and and knobs from our sensory environment, we lose: Muscle memory, Tactile stimulation, and Human time.”

AI, Robots, Algorithms

• About the Academic Integrity in the Post-plagiarism Era: Resistance is Futile > by Michael G. Wagner

“We stand at an inflection point that demands a thoughtful reconsideration of our fundamental educational values. As we navigate this post-plagiarism landscape, we must find new ways to ensure that intellectual honesty and meaningful learning remain central to our practice.”

• About AI being built to preserve, optimize and enforce a deeply rooted system of power. To keep the status quo of power. Highly recommended. By Pascal Wicht.

“The real Skynet isn’t a machine suddenly deciding to wipe out humanity. The real Skynet is the status quo itself—a deeply rooted system of power that AI is being built to preserve, optimize and enforce. The real story isn’t about AI turning against us. It’s about AI being trained to ensure that nothing fundamentally changes—no matter how untenable the future becomes.”

• About AI Data Poisoning - By Bruce Schneier

“Instead of simply blocking bots, Cloudflare’s new system lures them into a “maze” of realistic-looking but irrelevant pages, wasting the crawler’s computing resources. The approach is a notable shift from the standard block-and-defend strategy used by most website protection services.”

• About clotmaking for robots and other robotic companies. By Matt Webb

“Which means there’ll be a new need for new fashion designers. Fashion designers with experience in robot apparel, serving well-dressed artificial humans in head-to-toe haute couture.”

• Ambert Romero says this is a contender for the most important AI article of the year. “AI as Normal Technology” by Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor

“AI as normal technology is a worldview that stands in contrast to the worldview of AI as impending superintelligence. Worldviews are constituted by their assumptions, vocabulary, interpretations of evidence, epistemic tools, predictions, and (possibly) values. These factors reinforce each other and form a tight bundle within each worldview.”

• Kevin Kelly again, this time about Public Intelligence, as part of a Summer of Protocols workshop. Starts 2 min in, Q&A starts at 33 min. Also check out

  https://publicai.network/ an initiative on “Public Infrastructure for the Common Good”.

"Imagine 50 years from now a Public Intelligence that was a distributed, open-source, non-commercial artificial intelligence, operated like the internet, and available to the whole world. This public AI would be a federated system, not owned by any one entity, but powered by millions of participants to create an aggregate intelligence beyond what one host could offer. Public intelligence could be thought of as an inter-intelligence, an AI composed of other AIs, in the way that the internet is a network of networks. This AI of AIs, would be open and permissionless: any AI can join, and its joining would add to the global intelligence. It would be transnational, and wholly global – an AI commons. Like the internet, it would run on protocols that enabled interoperability and standards. Public intelligence would be paid for by usage locally, just as you pay for your internet access, storage, or hosting. Local generators of intelligence, or contributors of data, would operate for profit, but in order to get the maximum public intelligence, you need to share your work in this public non-commercial system."

Internet Culture

• Cognitive Debt by Smithery

“Where technical debt for an organisation is “the implied cost of additional work in the future resulting from choosing an expedient solution over a more robust one”, cognitive debt is where you forgo the thinking in order just to get the answers, but have no real idea of why the answers are what they are.”

• Tropical Technologist - From the pisonet, the aircon, the data center, to the POGO - by Chia

“But, where solar-powered servers and low technology are choices in the western world, the tropics remain plagued by larger infrastructural gaps. The least we can do is take action to prevent the continued deterioration of ourselves and machines. Our lands are razed by corporations, connectivity remains limited, the world’s systems are built off our exploitation, and face one disaster after another.”

Physical Reality

• About NASA’s Ocean in Motion

• Experts believe colossal squid may reach total lengths of 6 to 7 meters and weigh about as much as a small Italian Fiat at more than 500 kilograms, making them the heaviest known invertebrate.

Superior Reality

• About AI as a tool or perception/perspective arbitrage, and noticing the adjacent possible first. By Chris Perry.

“What matters now isn’t just what you know but how you see. As AI accelerates the flow of information, the premium moves to interpretation. I think of it as perspective arbitrage. It’s the edge you gain by spotting patterns others miss.”

New New Babylon

• Geoff Mulgan has a great post about the weightlessness of ideal government (and other) institutions. Focussing on lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, multiplicity (and potentially consistency). Could be part of the governance aspects of the New New Babylon

“These inspirations suggest a direction of travel for governments, and how they could become lighter, more agile and adaptive. They point in a very different direction to the chainsaw, scorched earth approach of Elon Musk, or the prescriptions of Project 2025, one of the blueprints for the Trump administration, which commits to ‘dismantle the administrative state and return self-governance to the American people’, but primarily focuses on how to radically cut spending and activity, and return to an 18^th century model of small government, rather than offering proposals which look to the future.”

Art related

• This is about the fantastic Berlinde De Bruyckere, who has a big expo show in BOZAR Brussels until the end of August 2025.

See also my studio visit post from 2022 https://petervanstudios.com/2022/08/19/inspiration-berlinde-de-bruyckere/

• We did not have opera yet in the Delicacies

Aesthetics

• Prada Feb 2025 show on scaffolds

• Dries Van Noten - Brocades

• Duran Lantink show March 2025

• About a new “morally questionable” Lars Von Trier expo in Copenhagen

Music/Sound/Dance

• About Brian Eno’s live in the studio, his “House of Play”. Such a rich conversation on creativity.

• If you want to relive 80ies repetitive beats in VR, go to the Barbican. Via Andreea Ion

• This is a new song by transgender Sam Bettens, two years after he came out, and is now ready to show his body. This is more fragile than “just” bodybuilding.

• I was always attracted to choirs. In 2022, I was lucky to be at the première of David Claerbout’s The Close. This included a live performance of Da pacem Domine of Arvo Pärt by the Flemish Radio Choir (Vlaams Radiokoor).

• Now there is a new recording by the Flemish Radio Choir conducted by Eric Whitacre, recorded in surround.

• And here is another recording from the Sacred Veil. I love the intimacy of this choir and recording

• Talking about intimacy. I am a big fan of Astrid Sonne. Here is a video of a recent recording of one of her DJ sets. No techno, but very soft human.

For real nerds

• What would it take for an interstellar ship to maintain a population on a 250-year trip to a (hopefully) habitable exoplanet? A wonderfully geeky exploration. Via Azeem.

Detail of book cover of Tau Zero. Artist: Manchu.

Recap

• The April 2025 update about Petervan Studios