Wakefulness, Wine, Noise and Shouts

This essay was written for the 'Artificially Intelligent' show at the V&A Museum; drawing on the Bacchanal and notions of the unreliable narrator to explore facets of artificial intelligence.

We often forget how much our world and society is dependent on technology and automation, and how Artificial Intelligence (AI) is already embedded in many aspects of our everyday life and society; from healthcare, finance, manufacturing, education and linguistics to business, law, policing, and more. These invisible, complex systems become more and more rooted in everyday activity; we give them more power and with it more responsibilities, while our trust and dependence on them has become normalised. At the same time – and mostly thanks to how advanced technologies and AI are being presented in popular media – most of us have a false picture of these systems and a limited or skewed understanding as to how they have been transforming society. We tend to anthropomorphise technology, to assign machines human behaviours, personalities, gender, while we often ignore what lies beneath; from how and for whom devices are designed, the conditions under which they are made, labour and conflict minerals to obsolescence, data collection, surveillance, and so on.

Heading towards an automated world, are we becoming accustomed to services, invisible infrastructures and opaque technologies without asking critical questions or discussing the ethical implications of these services? Should we trust companies with our personal data and privacy and how do we know how automated decisions are made– if they are fair or how they affect us? How do machines “learn” and how do they “see” us?