Curator Suzanne Livingston on where AI will take us in the future

"The deeper messages of the exhibition are about this conversation between East and West - an Eastern conception of the self and technology and a Western conception of the self and technology. My co-curator Maholo Uchida is from Tokyo so she brings with her a completely different perspective on technology, AI and robotics. In Japan, there is a culture based on the ancient Shinto belief system and according to that belief system objects are not inanimate in the way that we see them in the West. In fact inanimate objects are believed to have a soul or a spirit of their own called 'kami'. According to the Shinto tradition, humans are much more comfortable with living in a world where objects are seen to have a kind of life. There is a view that this why Japanese culture is more receptive to robotics. It is a culture more at ease with humans taking their place in a much bigger interconnected system with many different forces at play. They are more accepting of a world where they live alongside objects, where technology might have a life of its own. The exhibition is underpinned by some really big ideas - we're looking at the interaction and evolution of humans with machines. We look at humanlike qualities within technology and also how technology integrates itself into the human. It’s very much about the merging of the two and the evolution of who we are and what we are. The exhibition also examines where the phenomenon of AI comes from and how is it shaping our lives. And questions where AI will take us in the future?"

"There's so many different aspects to AI in our society today, the most positive are really in the area of social impact and solving some of the world's biggest problems - or at least beginning to solve them. That might be climate change, disease diagnosis, drug discovery, food production in parts of the world where food production is a challenge, education. All very big questions that we need to address for ourselves. We see huge leaps in terms of AI being able to help us with the big social problems of our time. But there are negative aspects to AI, two of which we've focused on in the show - racial bias and gender bias in data sets. Joy Buolomwini's work is very much focused on that, and really engages us all in that question about what we can do about it. The other big issue is about the distortion, the manipulation of what we might call truth - or objectivity. And the worst form of that is fake news. And this is obviously very disturbing for our sense of democracy and the choices we make. These are issues that we have to know about, we have to engage with, we have to work out our relationship to - again we can't become passive in relation to that and be very, very aware about the path we're taking through it. We're hoping that people can become aware of what they can do about it."

"AI's role in society has evolved in some significant ways. Until this point we've really only seen AI being used to solve specific isolated problems but as we go forward I think we're going to see AI as a much more global, interconnected system, almost a sea of intelligence in which we exist, all of the time. Like a world brain. And that's going to change our daily interactions and daily experiences profoundly. It's something that we'll be drawing from and uploading to continually. For me, it's a positive thing because we'll have this layer of intelligence that will give us so much more insight about behaviour and help us solve problems on a continual basis. I can see that some people might find it scary - but I can see that will be the big shift, from solving the big problems to a much more interconnected system."

"This is a really interesting question. In the West we have a conception of the self which is quite closed, a closed entity - top down, in control, rational, autonomous, often the highest of the evolutionary tree. This means that we are very resistant to change and we can become quite competitive. Some people talk about AI, our fear of AIs, as a fear of the other. I think that’s a useful analogy. In the East, with the belief systems like Shintoism or Daoism, which is where quite a lot of the inspiration and the content of the exhibition comes from, the self is a less closed off idea, it's much more interconnected with a wider set of forces. There's much more acceptance of human's place within that wider world. A less human centred view of the world, if you like."

"The future will be enormous for AI. I think what we'll see is more merging and blurring of the lines between technology, humans and nature - what we call the natural world. Whatever that might be and the definition of that is changing. We'll see that we are going to be part of a much bigger interconnected system. And that is going to really require us to really open up our idea of the human in profound ways."