sign better algorithms to follow the mental skills the workers are developing? Conversely, what happens for mental workers who, despite all their efforts, have a limited feeling of control? You need to find the most appropriate algorithm to fit your individual brain, such that you feel that this machinery is not something that comes over you, but something which follows you.
Michael Mitchell One of the things I found most exciting was being able to take a technology from the clinical setting of a laboratory and bring it to the public before it was offered by any of the commercial giants such as Google or Facebook, who might have other designs for it. We can create something abstract and philosophical that allows people to think about what kind of future they would like to see this technology be developed in. I’ve been a Mental Worker several times this week and sometimes you’re good at it and sometimes you’re not, but it does always provoke something. It makes you imagine a seamless brain-machine interaction with the world around you. I’ve gone home, for instance, and imagined turning the lights off or controlling my environment with my mind. If we do that frequently enough through modulating brain activity, we might reach a point where we don’t even realise we’re interacting with the world through this interface. Is that telling us that our relationship with our body isn’t as special as we have imagined it to be? Up until now, we have always thought that our body was the only thing with which we could interact without an intermediary interface – the only thing we can relate to on that very intimate level. So how does the potential of these brain-machine interfaces and the hyperconnected world change that relationship? It raises very profound questions about who we are and how we define ourselves.
Jonathon In the past, we had stories as mechanisms for understanding ourselves – for speculating on who and what we are, and what we might become. Various art forms have developed around that, ranging from plays, to movies, to dance. Here, we’re speaking about something that is a little bit different, because of the fact that it’s a new human-machine hybrid that is being made on the factory floor every time somebody walks in. Rather than standing outside of some possible future, and observing that possible future play out in the form of a movie about another person, you’re becoming that hypothetical being, if only for a short period of time. You’re experiencing it in some internal way that genuinely changes who and what you perceive yourself to be. To me, that is less within the realm of amplification of abilities than it is about what happens when your experience of the world is shifted, modified or undermined. Think about another revolution that happened before the Industrial Revolution: the Copernican Revolution. That was, on one hand, a very humbling moment when we found that the earth was not at the centre of things. On the other hand, we realised that by virtue of this mediocrity of who, what and where we are in the solar system, anything we observe locally has significance throughout the universe. Suddenly, we could derive universal laws based on experiments done in the here and now. That’s extraordinarily empowering. The process of being humbled by the cosmos can also be a process of finding some other aspect of yourself that is ultimately greater than your self-centred individuality: a communal self that is essential to mutual tolerance and collective decision-making in a democratic society. Even if we are only humbled by the Mental Work machines, that may be profound enough. We desperately need humility. The degree of hubris with which we’re operating in the world today is absolutely toxic.
Michael There’s a certain contradiction to some of the advertising that we put out for the exhibition in Lausanne and on the web. We had slogans like “Stop Machine Domination” and “Join the Cognitive Revolution”, while at the same time the exhibit has a very capitalistic element: we want you to come in because we want your data, an