MODEL
MACHINES

Exploring AI Futures Through Art and Design

Overview

It can be difficult to imagine what a world with AI deeply embedded in society might look and feel like. Yet these future visions are an integral part of establishing safeguards and building public trust, as well as designing policies that can adapt to possible future uses of AI.

So what might a world with AI look and feel like and how might AI benefit humanity? With these questions in mind, Google DeepMind worked with UAL: Central Saint Martins to design an experiential public exhibition entitled Model Machines. In partnership with our researchers, students on the MA Material Futures programme – a course exploring the intersection of science, technology and design – had nine weeks to research and design a future AI concept of their choosing and to build an experiential prototype.

Photo by: Maël Hénaff, Projects by: Scarlett Mercer, Yu Watanabe, Eimear Brennan and Hope Davies

Insights 

  • The students went beyond typical uses of AI - e.g. chatbots and robots - to imagine more speculative and provocative examples, such as an AI menopause companion, a tree-to-human translator and an AI-powered confessional booth. The examples provide a unique insight into how young designers and self-professed “non-techy people” think. This is a generation who will grow up with AI and be impacted by AI in ways we can’t yet imagine.

  • To realise and distribute the benefits of AI equitably we must recognize AI as a sociotechnical system in need of a systems design approach. As such, designers will play an integral role in the development of AI systems and their place in our material world. By bringing together interdisciplinary thinking, co-imagining critical and beneficial technology futures, and centering people, communities and ecologies from the beginning, designers can help us understand what problems AI can and should solve and what it means for AI to be beneficial.

  • Visual representations of AI–like those in science fi ction or the blue wired brains in any image search for “AI” – have the capacity to shape how people feel about a new technology. Those feelings are often what influences public trust and perception. The exhibition showed that there are countless creative uses for AI, most of which we could never imagine on our own and that aren’t currently represented in the public imagination.

  • The exhibition was a creative way to engage industry leaders and the general public in a conversation around how the world might prepare for Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). It provided a new way for leaders to engage with the topic and explore their own personal views of the technology.