Yet all of this, as powerful as it is, remains secondary to the everyday experience of living in our cities. Art lags behind,…
“Yet all of this, as powerful as it is, remains secondary to the everyday experience of living in our cities. Art lags behind, unable to capture the visceral quotidian experience of Uber, TaskRabbit, Snapchat, Giphy, Pokémon Go (which has already Been and Pokémon Gone), Helsinki’s autonomous shuttles and Singapore’s self-driving taxis, Japanese sushi-delivery robots and Domino’s Pizza delivery drones, American security-guard robots upended in shopping-mall fountains, South Korean robotic mannequins, ‘conversations’ with AI personal assistants over email, shouting at Amazon Alexa, ‘holographic’ assistants at airports, Microsoft chatbots becoming racist and genocidal on Twitter, Chinese chatbots vanishing after spurning the Communist Party, 4Chan, 3D printed handguns and Google Tango phones 3D-mapping spaces, Russian election-hacking multiplied by Cambridge Analytica and the Macedonian Fake-News Complex, Icelandic crowdsourced constitutions, Dutch police training eagles to take down illegal drones, Bitcoin hard forks, Ethereum hacks … In other words, a quick flick across the home page of The Verge or TechCrunch. Art in general has not found a foothold in these new times.”