I am a huge fan of Jason Silva. Particularly, his latest post about the “latent space and the new literacy of the AI age” hits a nerve. I need to go back a bit. To reading Dan Simmons´ Hyperion. While having a glass of wine on the beach in Spain. The common denominators are latent space and AI.
It is all about the connections
The AI is not the magic. AI collapses the distance. But it does not create the connection; it accelerates a journey that was already possible. Silva found the same thing photographing three unrelated objects in Amsterdam: a pillow, miniature houses, and a tourist boat and running them through a model together. “The categories dissolved,” he writes, “the relationships remained.” AI doesn’t hand you insight. It reveals a structure of relationships that was already latent, waiting for a question to make it visible.
Categories versus coordinates
Silva names the shift: for centuries we’ve asked what is this? — categorise, label, done. Latent space asks a different question: toward what does this point? “Intelligence starts to resemble topology more than taxonomy.” A concept isn’t a box. It’s a coordinate, defined by its relation to everything else. That matters for leaders. Most strategic language is categorical — competitor or partner, core or non-core. Categories make the world tractable, which is exactly why they miss connections that don’t respect boundaries.
Space comes before curiosity
Those connections happened because there was space for curiosity. A book. Wine on a beach, an unhurried afternoon in Amsterdam. Organisations want insight but design work around full calendars and constant interruption. Walking, reading, daydreaming look unproductive precisely because they build the mental library that AI later has something to connect to. AI can retrieve information. It cannot provide decades of context.
Loose mental space
None of this came from searching for a management insight. It came from a beach, a glass of wine, a stranger’s essay about Amsterdam — all landing in the same loose mental space. In a world of abundant information, the advantage won’t belong to those who know the most. It will belong to those who connect the most.
What are you building that increases the odds of your next unexpected connection? If you need help with this, DM me “SPACE”.
