The imagery and sound in this work were generated by AIs prompted to speculate on a technologically determined world driven by Big Tech–a world enveloped by a planetary-scale computation driven by Artificial Intelligence–after the collapse of the biosphere.

Prologue: Post Fourth Industrial Revolution–4IR–According to AI

The sentiments of the sound and lyrics generated by the AIs are youthful and hopeful–if somewhat naïve. The language of the imagery reflects the visual patterns created by humans over thousands of years of art history, conflating the real and the virtual, the human with the non-human, the factual and the fictitious, and it speaks to a utopian-dystopian future.

Episode 01: The Rise and Fall

The generative AI in this montage has a roughness of quality, highlighting the limitations of these early training models. The painterly imagery has many errors, glitches, and faults, including deformed human and animal forms, and the generative voiceover inflects in strange ways. Ironically, as generative AI improves, the charming nuance of these artifacts, by-products, and detritus will gradually disappear. The intrinsically dysfunctional nature of works from this period of AI evolution will be far more challenging to create, and this work will be considered retro in a very short time–if not already.

Background

Today, after more than three decades of digital revolution, we live in the era of surveillance capitalism, the monopolistic extraction of human surplus data from the networks and its aggregation, analysis, and weaponisation as behavioural advertising to modify human thoughts and behaviours. This all-or-nothing contest to manipulate the world for profit is unsustainable. As the middle class erodes and inequality rises, an elite super-class of tech billionaires emerges.

The emergent Fourth Industrial Revolution, colloquially referred to as 4IR or Industry 4.0, fundamentally differs from previous technological revolutions. This fusion of artificial intelligence (AI), smart systems, robotics, machine-to-machine communication, the Internet of Things (IoT), autonomous vehicles, biotechnology, and quantum computing will empower engineers, scientists, and private enterprise to accumulate radically disproportionate degrees of power and wealth, outside of democratic processes and regulatory frameworks. As the biotech and infotech revolutions merge, information will flow from the body and brain to 'smart' machines via biometric sensors, allowing corporations and government agencies to make decisions on citizens’ behalf and modify behaviour in new ways.

According to Yuval Noah Harari (2019), Big Data algorithms will monitor and ‘understand’ human behaviours and feelings much better than humans can. In this case, ‘humans and machines might merge so completely that humans will not be able to survive if they are disconnected from the network’. If so, the illusion of human ‘free will’ will likely disintegrate as authority shifts from humans to computers used by institutions, corporations, and government agencies to understand and manipulate us. Harari speculates that beyond manipulation, once these human and non-human entities have enough data, they will have the power to make choices for us or ‘hack the deeper secrets of life to re-engineer organic life and to create inorganic life forms’. Moreover, this form of ‘technological disruption is not even a leading item on the political agenda’, and engineers and scientists are constructing the emergent ‘twin revolution’ of biotech and infotech that could soon restructure ‘our very bodies and minds’.

Harari, Y. N. (2019). 21 Lessons for the 21st century. London, Vintage.

This thought experiment was an extension of TWIFSY (The world is fine, save yourself), which was curated by Experimenta in 2024 for Now or Never

This project involves the physical installation of TWIFSY, multi layered soundscapes, and these generative AI narratives to critique technological determinism and its impact on society.

Citizens are invited to participate in a series of Lunchbox talks at the T&G Building at 161 Collins Street from August 27th to 29th, 2024. Questions of identity, autonomy, and human agency at the convergence of reality and virtuality,the promises and pitfalls of the future Smart City, and the onset of Fourth Industrial Revolution will be addressed.