National Productivity Investment Fund (NPIF) 

Embodied AI and Distributed Intelligence: Being Human in the Age of Accelerated Innovation asks the urgent question of how we are preparing to encounter the various forms of Artificial Intelligence, from wearable technology, to robotics and personal assistants. The project will address this critical issue in 3 inter/intradisciplinary tracks: first by engaging the contemporary polemics in philosophy and social theory in respects to questions of what is to become human in an age of accelerated innovation; this will be done while engaging Google’s algorithmic developments in their Artificial Intelligence Lab. The second track involves a series of interventions and the construction of artifacts that are exploring the epistemological and practical boundaries, that will be inevitably shifted , of the increasingly entangled relationship between human ecology and machines.

The third aspect of the project is the contribution to the creation of a common vocabulary around the meaning of Artificial Intelligence and its impact on the social and political ecosystem. Trust, authenticity, transparency, bias, accountability and engagement will be explored in tangible artifacts in order to allow an embodied understanding and critical questioning of these problematics.

Using the framework of contemporary philosophy as it pertains to radical matter, acceleration and design innovation, the project’s methodology will draw on the discursive intersection between philosophy, meta-mathematics and coding as developed in the work of I.Stengers, B.Bratton, J.Golding and G.Chaitin.