SS_13/14 → Notes from Conversas Vadias #13 – Agostinho da Silva in conversation with Joaquim Vieira
Notes from Conversas Vadias #13
Agostinho da Silva in conversation with Joaquim Vieira
Originally broadcast by RTP on 31 May 1990.
Available through the RTP Archives.
It’s remarkable how some conversations seem to become more relevant with time.
This is one of them.
At one point, Agostinho says something that could easily have been said during today’s debates about artificial intelligence.
Let the Germans and the Japanese build the technology.
That isn’t the important part.
The important part is deciding what that technology is for.
He said this in 1990.
Long before smartphones.
Long before social media.
Long before AI became part of everyday life.
Yet somehow, he was already asking the question we’re only beginning to ask now.
Technology isn’t destiny.
Technology is direction made visible.
A hammer isn’t good or bad.
Neither is a computer.
Neither is an algorithm.
Neither is artificial intelligence.
The real question comes before the invention.
Who are we becoming while we build it?
And what kind of world does it help create?
Agostinho never seemed particularly fascinated by progress itself.
He was fascinated by purpose.
Perhaps that’s why another sentence from the conversation stayed with me.
The child will become the emperor of the world.
Not because children know more.
Not because they are wiser.
But because they haven’t yet forgotten how to imagine differently.
Throughout these conversations, children are never presented as incomplete adults.
They’re presented as human beings who still possess something the rest of us gradually lose.
Curiosity.
Wonder.
The ability to create without immediately asking whether it will be profitable.
Towards the end of the conversation, Agostinho says something that quietly summarises the entire series.
The best poet is the one who becomes the poem.
Not the one who writes beautiful words.
The one whose life becomes the work itself.
I’ve found myself returning to that sentence repeatedly.
It’s easy to admire ideas.
Much harder to embody them.
Perhaps wisdom isn’t collecting philosophies.
Perhaps it’s reducing the distance between what we believe…
…and the way we actually live.
Maybe that’s what Agostinho was trying to do all along.
Not convince people.
Become an example.
And perhaps that’s why, more than thirty-five years later, these conversations still feel unfinished.
Not because he failed to answer the questions.
Because he left them for us.
Original source
Conversas Vadias — Episode 13 → https://www.fernandomoreira.me/conversas-vadias-episodio-13-com-joaquim-vieira/
Agostinho da Silva in conversation with Joaquim Vieira.
Broadcast by RTP on 31 May 1990.
Available through the RTP Archives.