AI keeps getting more capable. Are we? I'm teaching AI, Leadership & Agency for the second time, starting Oct 27. 8 weeks of practical experimentation, human agency, and responsible AI leadership, now with a hands-on Build Lab. academy.voicesofemergence.co…

A few weeks after our Brussels gathering, Amit Paul asked us one question: what are we learning about emergence? That became a conversation with Amit, Samantha Sweetwater and Rudy de Waele about what happens the Monday morning after everyone goes home voicesofemergence.substack.c…

The harbor looked like shelter. Calm water, high cliffs, a rest from the open sea. The whole fleet sailed in. Odysseus moored outside. He lost 11 of 12 ships in minutes. Nobody was tempted. They were sheltering. That's how collective capture actually works alexdecarvalho.substack.com/…

The Sirens do not promise pleasure. They promise to tell you everything. Every notification, every scroll, every AI prompt swearing the next insight completes the picture. Odysseus ties himself to the mast. The hubris would have been to listen unchained. alexdecarvalho.substack.com/…

Achilles conquers; Odysseus returns. Achilles reaches for immortality; Odysseus chooses to be mortal. Achilles wins through force; Odysseus through relationship. 22 years between the two films. The gap says more about us than about casting. alexdecarvalho.substack.com/…

Social media didn't die. The object won. Every network that worked was built around a shared thing. Interest media deletes the friends and hands you the object alone. I don't miss the old feed. I miss being connected to someone instead of to something open.substack.com/pub/alexde…

The good news: a chain can be mended. A thin link can be thickened. Resilience isn't strength everywhere. It's finding the one stage that won't hold, in you, your team, your community, and tending it before the cold comes. The fire only needs one awake. alexdecarvalho.substack.com/…

We build strategies that quietly assume the man on watch stays awake. He doesn't always. A strategy that cannot survive its own weak link, or the loss of a vendor, is not a strategy. It is a hope. In calm, the weak link hides. Under pressure, it is found. alexdecarvalho.substack.com/…

Finnish Army, Lapland. 10 of us to a tent, one stove, fed in shifts all night. The shift was called kipinä. Spark. One stayed awake. One night he fell asleep. At 3am we woke shivering, the fire dead. A system is only as strong as its weakest link alexdecarvalho.substack.com/…

Two people walk into the same cafe. For her, the prices on the menu light up. She grew up counting money at the kitchen table. For him, one empty chair at a table of laughing friends glows. He grew up at the edge of the playground. Same room. Two worlds. open.substack.com/pub/alexde…

We've spent thousands of hours consuming other people's futures and almost none authoring our own. The dystopias arrive pre-rendered. The futures we desire, we have to make ourselves. alexdecarvalho.substack.com/…

What you cannot imagine, you will not enact. Why imagining your ideal future is the most overlooked leadership skill in the age of AI: alexdecarvalho.substack.com/…

Blade Runner. The Matrix. Minority Report. If you grew up on these films, you carry a vision of the future you never chose. I wrote about how to take it back: alexdecarvalho.substack.com/…

indigenous elder once told me: in the forest, there's no wifi, but the connection is stronger.

The Liminal Soil course has been the tender one. We started with gratitude, then moved through grief. Grief is the part most people want to skip, and the part that changes everything.

I thought I was teaching the enactment arc in my AI leadership course. Instead, every session teaches it back to me. Consciousness, communication, creativity, collaboration, systems change. Each one shows a new facet. alexdecarvalho.substack.com/…

It is June. The year has folded in half. Two courses and a gathering, all running at once, and they are all quietly teaching me the same thing. alexdecarvalho.substack.com/…

Three things that often blur together: awareness, embodiment, enactment. They are not the same. The third one costs. A new piece on the Vision Quest, FOMO, and the move from recognition into a different choice. alexdecarvalho.substack.com/…

I can leave before I abandon myself. A new piece on the gap between knowing a pattern, feeling it in the body, and actually choosing differently in the world. alexdecarvalho.substack.com/…

The framework had been in me for years. It took finding the word for what had been protecting me from being seen with it before I could put it somewhere else. alexdecarvalho.substack.com/…