Hello Worlds

The climate crisis is on everyone's lips. While one faction is calling for a radical rethinking of our economic model and lifestyle to prevent it, the other is backing techno-solutionist ideas such as geo-engineering which promise to "repair" the environment without us having to give up any of our much-loved comforts. Thus, the earth, which has been exploited and transformed by humans, not least for the production of digital technologies, is now paradoxically to be saved by these very technologies. Big Data and algorithms are ascribed superhuman, even godlike abilities, which at the same time fundamentally question the human condition.

For a number of decades, particularly the subject of Artificial Intelligence has held a fascination and a fear for humankind. On the one hand, the era of thinking machines promises us solutions to many of our thorniest problems, and the glamour of a truly Sci-Fi future. On the other, it threatens to surpass and negate our own abilities, and entrench existing inequalities and biases ever deeper in society. But AI has not turned out the way we expected it to: the intelligence it demonstrates is less like our own than we expected, and this realisation comes just as we are discovering a wealth of thinking in the non-human world that exceeds our wildest imaginations. James Bridle – writer („New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future“) and artist working across technologies and disciplines – explores the possibilities of machine and more-than-human intelligence, the ecological impact of technology, and the ways we might rethink our relationships with other beings, in search of a more just and survivable future.