People don’t have buttons

by Algolit

Since the early days of artificial intelligence (AI), researchers have speculated about the possibility of computers thinking and communicating as humans. In the 1980s, there was a first revolution in Natural Language Processing (NLP), the subfield of AI concerned with linguistic interactions between computers and humans. Recently, pre-trained language models have reached state-of-the-art results on a wide range of NLP tasks, which intensifies again the expectations of a future with AI.

This sound work, made out of audio fragments of scientific documentaries and AI-related audiovisual material from the last half century, explores the hopes, fears and frustrations provoked by these expectations.

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Concept, sound edit: Javier Lloret

List of sources: 'The Machine that Changed the World : Episode IV -- The Thinking Machine', 'The Imitation Game', 'Maniac', 'Halt & Catch Fire', 'Ghost in the Shell', 'Computer Chess', '2001: A Space Odyssey', Ennio Morricone, Gijs Gieskes, André Castro.