The Future of Intelligence

On Wednesday, August 9th, “A Long Night of Dreaming about The Future of Intelligence” takes place at the Locarno Film Festival. From sunset to sunrise, Festival guests and visitors are invited to learn and dream together about possible futures of intelligence. Guided by researchers, artists, and cinephiles, these questions will be addressed: how do different forms of artificial and ecological intelligence manifest today? How might intelligence change in the future? And what is the role of cinema in shaping intelligence and rendering it visible? For the duration of an entire night, emerging forms of intelligence and their impact on society can be discussed and experienced in talks, workshops and performances.

The Long Night is a collaboration between the Locarno Film Festival, BaseCamp and the Università della Svizzera italiana (USI). It is generously supported by Stiftung Mercator Schweiz. The event is a successor of “The 24h long conversation on The Future of Attention” at Locarno75. As last year, it is curated by researcher and futurist Rafael Dernbach.

Generative AI platforms have opened a wondrous world of images, texts and sounds. We are astonished, amused or disturbed by these creations and by their noisy promise of a radically different future. At the same time, ecological critiques challenge what we consider as intelligent behavior: have we neglected non-human forms of intelligence? Might fungi or forests be more capable of solving complex problems than human minds? For one long night, we approach intelligence by the means of dreaming together. Inspired by cinema’s deep relation to dreams, we want to learn together about intelligence: its manifestations, its hallucinations and its possible futures. We start our journey on August 9th at sunset, 20:44. And we end our journey on August 10th at sunrise, 6:17. We gather at Basecamp Instituto Sant’Eugenio and go through a series of learning experiences that invite, both, collective dreaming and critical thinking.