Collision Courses 3 [Skawennati/Harris Smith/Rodríguez]

3 February 2020, 2:00 - 4:00 PM
Black Box Theatre, L.R. Wilson Hall

Contemporary artists spend a good deal of time pondering the limitations of their current thinking, practices, materials and techniques, while scanning the horizon for new opportunities among emerging technologies and related cultural changes. This appetite for the new, in addition to a tendency for art to reflexively brood upon existential questions, makes artificial consciousness a compelling subject matter; thus, I want to build an artificial consciousness. But this raises several difficulties, beyond the obvious and related problems of having a satisfactory explanation of consciousness and the specification for its technological implementation. Ethical concerns await: Is suffering is an inevitable companion to consciousness? In multiplying artificial moral patients will we squander a limited capacity for moral concern owed to our fellow humans and companion creatures? Is consciousness the critical factor that will release artificial intelligence from its present dependence upon human objectives? Is the machine implementation of consciousness the ultimate expression of a mistaken anthropomorphic approach to technology?

In this artist’s talk, I consider the realization of artificial consciousness in the trajectory of human creativity, tracing a lineage from the prehistory of artmaking and animism to present ethical concerns regarding anthropomorphic treatment of robots and AI. A non-naïve anthropomorphic approach to our design and engagement of artificial agents, especially the artificial reproduction of models of human consciousness in machines, may be both desirable and necessary in order to situate ourselves in an emerging age of AI. A world suffused with AI technology may be as mysterious to us as the natural world was to early humans and our predisposition to animate AI with human values might be exactly the type of cognitive expansion required to exploit its novel problems and potential rewards.

Uandani | Uandanstskua is a project by andamio.in --a collective art and educational platform in which I am co-founder-- that developed during a 12-month period in 2017-18. This activity resulted in 5 workshops colliding educational, philosophical, artistic and technological approaches. It was localized in the state of Michoacán, México within five communities: Zacán, Angahuan, Rancho Milpillas, Zumpimito, and Uruapan. This talk rises from a paper with the same name that explores the experiences on designing and working within this project, but most important, on reflecting about how this project collided with other projects. Ending up with more questions that the ones we set when we started it. Questions about our own being, the being of the children, the being of the community, the being of the teachers, the beings of the spaces we inhabited during each activity, and most important: the being of the project. https://andamio.in/edu/uandani