What a driverless world could look like

This series of three advertising spots, based on Julio Cortazar's eponymous short story, shows a monumental traffic jam that starts one day in the middle of nowhere for unknown reasons and ends up lasting hundreds of days.

This brilliant piece of advertising aired in Argentina right when I joined the Renault marketing team. It struck me as it captured masterfully that epic competition between the mechanical, cold and boring absurdity of a traffic jam and the messy nature of life, its feelings, its passion, its noises. If traffic keeps slowing down to reach absurd proportion, life would come back with a vengeance and recapture that abandoned time and space.

This other ad aired in France just as I was joining Renault's marketing team. Laguna was the first mass-market vehicle to be launched in the European market with a new generation of onboard electronics, the ancestor of the current self-driving technologies. The creative team from Publicis found no better inspiration than biology itself to capture where the automotive industry was going. This creative intuition created an ad that was visually stunning at the time and the concept itself is more relevant than ever today.

Daniel Arasse stands very high in my list of relatively unknown intellectual heroes. In this short book, Arasse — a respected expert in renaissance art — invites us to take a closer look at six renaissance paintings, to slowly meander through their details, to question their message, their composition, their colors, and ultimately their meanings and the author's intentions. This book is a loving and erudite ode to art and a convincing invitation to combine your brain and your eyes to see art and ultimately the world differently.

There are few disciplines that are as defining of our current decade as data Visualization, the collision of big data and visual arts. Data visualization is really a stunning cultural artifact in that it is something I could use for my work to solve some of our most exciting professional challenges but also a beautiful outlet of human creativity, a subject of exhibitions that I love to visit in modern art galleries and museums. If Pedro Cruz was exhibiting his Lisbon traffic fata visualization in a cool gallery in Atlanta, I would not hesitate a second to spend an evening admiring his visuals and learning about his approach.

Another powerful data visualization that illustrates the strong link between complex human systems and familiar biological mechanisms.

Vincent LaForet is one of the most talented photographers of his generation. His "Air Project" is a collection of breathtaking aerial views of some of the world's greatest cities, from San Francisco and New York to London, Berlin, Barcelona and Sydney. Despite my restless nature, I could stare at his images for hours, maybe days.

A fascinating talk by one of the world's most respected cognitive scientists. Daniel Dennett explains in simple terms how the brain can be described as a social arena of neurons and groups of neurons competing against each other with different agendas. The brain is another biological system that we should look at when we think about the future of a complex system like human transportation. The brain's structure, performance and computations can offer refreshing insights on how we could solve our traffic problems and take urban transportation to whole new levels of sophistication and efficiency.

Robin attempts to describe the age, a few decades from now, when robots will be able to fully emulate human brains and capture that "je ne sais quoi" behind human stunning cerebral capabilities. He methodically describes the consequences of such a technology leap on our societies, our cities, our economies and our social life. A very entertaining and thought-provoking read.