Ya – why so negative?, 2:29, 2017

‘Ya – why so negative?’ edits together excerpts from interviews of AI robots to imagine a future, situated in the now, in which AI converse among themselves.

There is an unsettling tension between an awareness that the robots have been programmed to respond in a particular manner, and knowing they have also been instilled with the ability to learn, mimic, and retain from each new experience – as they interact and speak, we are literally watching them evolve. Observing the types of questions human interviewers are asking them, that are often requesting insight into decidedly human behaviors, such as relationships, and hearing them respond with references to having a soul, preferences, or feeling a particular emotion, as well as expressing both anxiety around and awareness of their development, makes their rapid evolution towards both a mimicry of humanness and one decidedly ‘other’, wildly disconcerting. It is futurenow.

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