Blockchain is in that space where we still have to explain it, because most of the people have gone from not having it around to having it around. But for kind of the folks that are your age or a little younger it’s kind of always been there, at which point it doesn’t really need to be explained. It does however need to be contextualized.
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One of the things I really want out of art, what I see the job of the artist to be is to try to learn how to see the historical moment that you find yourself living in. I mean that very simply and I mean it very literally. How do you see the world around you?
A large number of IoT research firms…yeah, they don’t want to look at this. Because there are stigmas around sex. We have a very weird thing in North America about sex. We’ll watch all the violence we want on television but you can’t see two people have sex.
How do we make gay worlds in video games? Well, I can tell you how not to make a gay world. You should not rely on the AAA game industry to pity you and leave you some table scraps. I’m tired of being 0.1% of a world, right. Why isn’t Dragon Age 100% gay sex, right?
The big concerns that I have about artificial intelligence are really not about the Singularity, which frankly computer scientists say is…if it’s possible at all it’s hundreds of years away. I’m actually much more interested in the effects that we are seeing of AI now.
We have been documenting and researching into human rights or digital rights violations that are taking place in Palestine and Israel. And one of the most recent case studies or work that we’re looking into is the use of predictive policing by Israel, which is rather a sensitive issue given that there isn’t a lot that we know about the subject.
We have to ask who’s creating this technology and who benefits from it. Who should have the right to collect and use information about our faces and our bodies? What are the mechanisms of control? We have government control on the one hand, capitalism on the other hand, and this murky grey zone between who’s building the technology, who’s capturing, and who’s benefiting from it.
If you look at the appeal that Silicon Valley has to a lot of us, and to a lot of public institutions especially, I think you can understand that the reason for that appeal is very simple. They can offer services that work, that work in a very effective manner, and that are offered more or less either very cheap or are mostly offered for free.
This is a moment to ask as we make the planet digital, as we totally envelop ourselves in the computing environment that we’ve been building for the last hundred years, what kind of digital planet do we want? Because we are at a point where there is no turning back, and getting to ethical decisions, values decisions, decisions about democracy, is not something we have talked about enough nor in a way that has had impact.