“Children playing with a bomb.” This is how the Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom has described us, today’s humanity, not only developing artificial intelligence (AI) but indulging in it almost without restraint, unaware of the consequences. The image is by no means new; it runs through cultural history from the Golem of early medieval Jewish mysticism to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to the HAL 9000 on-board computer running amok in Stanley Kubrick’s film “2001: A Space Odyssey”. Of course, this is all speculation. It all started though with a one and a zero.
In the frame work of the DIGITAL ART RESIDENCIES project and under the title “One and Infinity”, the Dresden cultural collective pampelmuse, that is the philosopher Doreen Siegmund and the theatre pedagogue Samuel Fink, talked together with the computer scientist Nico Buntsprecht about the workings of digitalisation and its effects on our cultural understanding. The programme was broadcast live on coloRadio (colouradio.org / 98.4 & 99.3 MHZ) on 24 June and is now also available as a podcast.