Blog

Blade Runner: 2049 is the sequel to Ridley Scott’s original Blade Runner released in 2017. The film continues the cyberpunk aesthetic and the quest for what defines humans, the director Denis Villeneuve, however, took a more detailed and timely lens to the sentient world-making than that in the original. One reason being that the CGI of cinema has developed greatly since the release of the original in 1979, special effects provide endless possibilities for filmmakers to work on. Another reason is that the imagination of a sentient world emerged in recent years, people no longer feel surprised about some of the technology showcased in the original because they have already come true: from sentient billboards that displayed customized advertisings to autopilot cars that can navigate themselves. In 2049, Villeneuve took one step further to expand the landscape of sentient technology to a non-human yet conscious character. Being one of the most exciting technologies in the film, JOI, a digital companion created by Wallace Corporation has been an important aid to the protagonist K as he set out to trace the first replicant-born child.

Joi first appears in the film when K comes back from a mission. Existing only with a hologram projector installed in K’s home, she prepared a virtual dinner for K and lit his cigarette with her finger tip. K later gave her an Emanator, which allows her to be portable. She was then taken to the rooftop where she “feels” the rain for the first time. As the story proceeds she helped K find the birth information at the station and insisted K to delete all her from the console and carry her only in the Emanator as K being hunted the LAPD, which might lead to permanent lost of data. At this stage, K has developed strong feeling towards Joi and Joi, either consciously or programmed to do so, responded to such sentiment. Later in the film, Wallace’s assistant Luv destroyed the Emanator as K and Deckard were captured. With no doubt, the holographic effects presented in the film are stunningly executed, but more importantly, we can see as audience, the possibility held by artificial intelligence and specifically that of the entity with virtual assistant. In the context of sentient technology, this might be the ultimate goal as it could potentially be a “human” existing in virtual spaces: they act and think like human. This comes to the question of what really defines a human? Are AI more human than human? Of course the answers to these question might never be definite. Like with the virtual assistant Samantha in Spike Jones’s Her, the protagonist K found out that Joi is just a product that is available to everyone who can afford. He stands in front of the giant billboard in which “JOI” called the name she gave him “Joe” and realize that all the feelings he had were based completely on the holographic image. But should we consider that an alternative to human life?

  When talking about cameras used in city, we used to think about those cameras for capturing drivers who break traffic rules. But now, artificial intelligence-enabled cameras and sensors can keep an eye on the surroundings to monitor and police the city, and in turn enhance the security level in the city. Actually, Chinese are now living in a world that is built with the largest and most sophisticated camera surveillance system. Artificial intelligence cameras are in widespread use across the whole country.

  One example of the use of AI camera is when it is applied to detect a traffic junction about its real-time conditions like crowd density, vehicle density and even the walking speed of pedestrians. These real-time data can be accessed accurately. If a junction is too crowded, policeman would come to that spot to maintain order to avoid incidents like stampede happen. This technology is based on deep learning and techniques for computer visions. The real-time monitor and statistical data of the place makes “smart judgements” about whether the place is overly crowded or if it has abnormal gathering of crowds.

  Another situation where ai cameras are used is when someone sneak into a “sensitive” or “prohibitive” area and think he or she will not be found because no one is there. In a circumstance like this, the ai camera “knows” you and recognizes you and there is no need for a living person to be there, because on the other side of the camera, every move of yours and even the look in your eyes are clearly seen on the screen by policeman. Through deep learning in the characteristics and movements of human body, this recognition system can automatically detect and mark the spot of someone. When someone abnormally enters a prohibitive area or has some abnormal actions, the system can automatically release warning. A very similar example is when someone is acting abnormally,  the warning system can smartly detect whether people are conducting some fast activities or fighting with each other and give off alert to the background.

  These are just a few examples of how ai cameras are now applied in real life situations to build a safer, smarter and more efficient city. AI in smart cities development can play a crucial role in urban planning, development and management with things like advanced security systems and traffic monitoring. The implementation of AI in real life is actually more ubiquitous than ordinary people can imagine. The life we are now living in which crimes or illegal events are rarely seen perhaps is not the result of “no dangers for real”,  but rather it is the result of the fact that we are now living in the full surveillance of all kinds of lens and cameras whose duty is to provide for us that kind of safe environment. But at the same time, all of our information, whether personal or not, can be fully grasped and kept by the city to be used in ways we are never able to think of. It is true that we are living in a safer environment thanks to technology, yet this camera surveillance network, will it become something that we will never ever be able to escape from either in the near or far future?

 

Watch more in this video about China’s camera surveillance network: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=58&v=pNf4-d6fDoY&feature=emb_title

“We are also the skin of what we wear. The garment being cut and sewn is not only for us to wear; the city also wears us.” Using such a metaphor, Bratton talked about the sentient city, and the mutual interaction between the urban AI technology and citizens. A driverless car is a common example for urban sensing, as we all know, it has multiple sensors to detect situations and form its behavior by algorithms. However, a driverless car is just a small part of the road, a tool to make life more convenient. And what Bratton suggested in his article is an incipient mechanic sensate world – the whole sensing and thinking systems are built into the fabric of the city.  It’s interesting to read the author’s comparison between the cuttlefish and the sentient city. Based on material chemistry, the operating mechanism of the city is just like a cuttlefish, which can respond to different situations flexibly like the nervous system of the brain. However, some people also pointed out the potential risks of the sentient city in public health, national security and the environment. (Read more here)

A picture that compares the city to a brain system

Gabrys argued that telepathy is a form of invisible communication that can describe “how a wireless city talks to itself, circulating messages and programming urban ecologies.” (Pp. 50) Here the famous argument “The medium is the message” raised by McLuhan was applied to the urban telecommunication in a new way. The invisible particles in the atmosphere of urban city act as medium, and at the same time, they also make up the important electrical environment that change the people’s life. The author then talked about Paul Virilio’s discussion of the “overexposed city”, in which he pointed out that the electronic telecommunication changed the physical fabric of the city in both spatial and time dimensions. Here I found that his opinion was somehow similar to my thoughts about the mobile food delivery system. He said that, with telecommunications, the city exists all at once and so lacks “here and there”, and another assemblage of space and time emerges through the operation of invisible frequencies. Therefore, the modes of space and time are intensified, and electronic signals can transmit across stretches of space all the time.

When it comes to the Mobile food delivery system, I argue that it changes urban citizen’s understanding of space and time, and the invisible spatial and time infrastructures in the modern city. First, online ordering and delivery system have changed the standard by which people measure time. People’s estimation of time is largely shaped by the results generated by the platform’s big data and algorithms. The division of labor and the order-taking system continue to shorten the delivery time, thus intensifying such competition in the industry. Besides, the limited cold chain coverage prevents rural residents from buying foods with a short shelf life. Therefore, the difference in time perception between urban and rural residents can become more obvious. Secondly, the convenient mobile food delivery system makes the location of restaurants and food stores no longer important. Even if people often buy food from a restaurant, they may not know where some shops are located. Just as Virilio said, the virtual mirage of is presented in front of people with the help of digital technology, so people further reduce their attention to the street and physical location. Moreover, the rapid development of the mobile food industry has largely hit physical stores, leading to the emergence of some restaurants without physical storefronts, further aggravating the curl of urban space.

This week I visited Yuz Museum Shanghai for “Lying Sophia and Mocking Alexa”, an immersive exhibition exploring the human/machine relationships within the framework of Artificial Intelligence. The exhibition brings together artists and researchers examining the topic from a variety of perspectives including the impact of AI on global technopolitics and on geologies, the absurdity of quantifying human emotion, the dark labor involved in training human-like algorithms and the myth-like narratives about AI propagated by the media.

 

“Sophia” and “Alexa”, transformed into text and audio by the GPT-2 model AI software, are the two central characters in Lying Sophia and Mocking Alexa. With three dimensional dialogues taking place throughout the exhibition, they serve to interpret the subject of AI, which is paradoxical and implies manifold future potentials. Sophia, a robot that has been granted Saudi citizenship, is highly responsive and has a realistic human look. A life-like robot living among us, she can even conduct diplomacy and is seen as an “ambiguous scam” co-authored by media and technology companies. Alexa is a “servant” who takes the shape of a machine and resides in domestic corners. She has been reported to have “horrible laughter,” symbolizing the opacity, uncontrollability and dangerous potential of the AI “black-box” to slide into voyeurism and subversion. In the exhibition, Sophia and Alexa are contemporary metaphors for our evolving relationship to these new technologies. The former’s lies are the projection of poetic imagination –a bright, lyrical imagination. While the latter’s ridicule demonstrates cracks in the black-box algorithm, representing a murky existence fraught with technical criticism. The existence of Sophia and Alexa and the dialogue between them allow the audience to experience the exhibition as a voyeur, witnessing the fullness, imponderability and last hope of the psychological world.

As a bystander, the exhibition leads us to question: if artificial intelligence is no longer purely a concept of science fiction and if the development of basic science continues to expand the boundaries of our cognition, will what we are experiencing be the black hole event horizon that, as Vernor Vinge foresees, “breaks all prophecies” or serves as “the biggest mistake we have ever made” as indicated by Stephen Hawking? Today, AI is widely used in chips, processors, data collection and analysis, forming a new frontier in global technological competition. It is a topic that similarly points to infinite possible futures in the changing world of science and technology. However, outside of technology industries, it is still not easy to know directly what products and programs utilize AI as it becomes the easiest, but also the hardest story to tell in mass media.

---

Among the exhibits, there are two closely related to the issue of infrastructure. One is called “Red Lines”, revealing another side of the internet, one that moves at the speed of weather, wind, and tide. Red Lines is a pioneering new project by Evan Roth which involves a network of mesmerizing video landscapes streamed free to your home or workplace. The network contains infrared videos of coastal landscapes that can be streamed to a smartphone, tablet, or computer by anywhere. Roth has traveled to coastal sites around the world where the cables that make the internet possible emerge from the sea. 

 

The other one is composed by a map about the anatomy of an AI system, as a way to begin seeing across a wider range of system extractions of AI. At this moment in the 21st century, we see a new form of extractivism that is well underway: one that reaches into the furthest corners of the biosphere and the deepest layers of human cognitive and affective being. The stack that is required to interact with an Amazon Echo goes well beyond the multi-layered “technical stack” of data modeling, hardware, servers and networks. The full stack reaches much further into capital, labor and nature, and demands of an enormous amount of each. These systems add up to become a new infrastructure. The scale required to build AI systems is too complex, too obscured by intellectual property law, and too mired in logistical complexity to fully comprehend in the moment. Yet you draw on it every time you issue a simple voice command to a small cylinder in your living room: “Alexa (or Siri), what time is it?”

---

The exhibition contains many other intriguing installations and masterpieces, such as “Ca-Ca”, which learns the way you invest before you die and will follow your life’s path and continue the way you left your mark on the world; “Alice & Bob”, an installation of continually evolving love letters that uses data from a quantum computer. Just as Bratton articulates, “as a different and more literal connotation of ‘distributed cognition’ takes form in this way, the already contested line between world-sensing and information-processing  gets blurrier.” Here is an imagery that the remote and ambiguous AI system will probably become an emerging media infrastructure in our future sentient cities. The logic can be applied to many other cases, such as software for modifying pictures. In China, Meitu has become a seemingly “infrastructure-like” app for supporting our production of everyday pictures that will be posted elsewhere on the internet. What we have to do is to contemplate the new definitions and layers of “infrastructure”, and our relationship to it. And “we should crave to learn what would ensue.”

Nowadays, beautified camera apps have largely transformed our perception of beauty, especially to those who are addicted to social media and short-video platforms. As Benjamin Bratton argues, “Any surface is potentially a skin and its sensitivity is open to design.” We could both consider the AI system behind the apps and the interfaces of beautified cameras as a skin. AI systems embedded in these products capture and learn the “characteristics of beautiful faces” through constantly reading numerous human faces. But the problem is that, although AI seems to be an object without subjectivity and gathers objective facts, it is actually shaped by human, with either explicit or implicit cognitive bias.

The subjectivity of AI could further be deepened with our biased cognition and “teaching”. Beautified cameras are inclined to “standardize” our cognition of beauty and eventually, narrow it. There was a period of time when users were overly beautified and their faces look distorted—overly v-shaped faces and big eyes—in those cameras, but now, as users are allowed to manually adjust the angle of their eyebrows, the height of their nose bridge, the width of their forehead, etc., their activities on these apps turn into user data which is further learnt by machines. As a result, today’s beautified cameras are both closer to the mainstream aesthetics and more natural, hardly showing modification.

“The flexibility and ubiquity of sensors is a function of the platformization of components and sub-components across applications, and the distribution of the same or similar sensors across surfaces means that different kinds of bodies share the same sensory systems.” AI systems behind beautified cameras, seen as powerful sensors, have been applied to various applications over time. For instance, beautification is now widely used in short-video platforms like Douyin and Kuai, and makeup recommendation apps. It is said that “it seems that there’re so many beauties and handsome guys on these social media platforms, but why can’t we find them in reality?” Beautification on one hand greatly blurs the boundary between virtual and reality, evolving the illusion that people would look exactly the same as those on social media, on the other hand encourages the mass to judge whether a person is beautiful or not with models of beautification. AI profoundly changes the way we look at appearance.  It’s not astonishing that in contemporary China, those who have delicate small faces with bigger eyes and lighter skin are more likely to be chased after and become profitable influencers.

Beautification has not only applied to human faces, but also exert its influences on city-planning. UK researchers have trained AI to recognize beautiful scenery using deep learning. (https://www.wired.co.uk/article/ai-learns-the-meaning-of-beauty) They first processed 2 million images and labelling them with information on what landforms are on the pictures, then explored what attributes rate higher according to a large database (somewhat subjective). It is not surprising that images containing natural features with historical architecture gained higher scores, yet interestingly, scenes with open expanses lowered the score. How the AI system thinks is inextricable from how it senses. If the machine is taught by the database that valleys, beaches, and church deserve appreciation, while grassland and athletic fields are looked down upon, it isolates the connections between different landforms, which may contribute to harmonious landscape, and rate a scene unfairly.

The rating was further developed into an emerging technology and AI nowadays is likely to help design the landscape of a city. Yet as the rating may transform our perception of beauty and we growingly rely on AI, the designs provided by AI can be abrupt and inhumane.

The city can feel our sentiment and realize us. Actually, sometimes, I think we might not know ourselves more than the city or the technology do. Everything of us can be transferred into data or number or be categorized. Our information is stored and analyzed. This is how the city feel us. Actually, we also know that the city is sensing/feeling us, the connection is everywhere but we can choose to neglect it.
Last month, I purchased a product in a store in the mall. And in the following weeks, I can see the ads of the brands in many different websites. All these ads surround me, it is horrible. But it is not the first time that such thing happened in my life, and I am used to it, so then I think I neglect what was happening. It is the communication between us and the technological society, where we cannot escape from.
The information of us is the stimulation that contribute the sensorium. Now in my daily life, for my biological body, I also deal with it with the information. I think myself is editable. Last week, I could not fall in sleep, then I took a melatonin. The ingredients of the pills began the talks with my biological body, the ingredient then is the information carried. Then my biological body received the order and functioned like a machine and made me feel sleepy, then I could go to sleep.
It is the sensibility that enable the city to modify itself, which makes itself sustainable. It is the same as how we utilize pills to adjust our own bodies’ status. You have to admit that it is pretty efficient, and safe. While we are taking the pills, we are like the city. However, what we are when we are in the city. We are countless cells that hold together to shape such a huge life entity.
In the movie Matrix, there are two pills, one is red and the other one is blue, the choice of the pills means whether to know the truth of the matrix world, but it true that, no matter which pill to take, the true would not change, what could be changed is how Neo feels the world, which is similar to the society that we are living in right now. Whether we know how our data is taken, and know how our actions are influence and modified, we still cannot resist.