Newly Forgotten Technologies

In this installation, two hundred discarded and abandoned smartphones, iPads, and smart speakers are laying in a darkened e-waste dump sometime in the near-future, while their onboard voice assistants (Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant, etc) tell stories about how and why they were thrown away. Across the dozens of stories, many different possible futures are described where speculative technological, social, and ecological events change our relationship to AI and ‘smart’ technologies to the point where devices like these have been discarded. Some of these are futures we might want, and some we should try to avoid.  None of these stories describe computers becoming sentient, but all of them talk about the different ways that humans react and respond over time to a changing world.

• https://www.wesleygoatley.com/newly-forg...
• https://london.sciencegallery.com/ai-art...