Slanted Magazine #37—AI

Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) has become—besides being an over-hyped buzzword across industries (that the design world is no exception to)—a reality. We debate about the impacts of A.I. and its subsets, machine and deep learning, and consider everything from virtual to augmented realities, and how these technologies may change our lives, jobs, and social relationships altogether.

We live in times where decisions about what we want are no longer under our control. While we believe to be free (at least in our western world), algorithms dictate our lives, hopes, and dreams. We are the parents and children, gods and slaves of the technology we invented: although it’s a masterpiece, there is a great dependence. If “algorithms will liberate themselves entirely from us,” Peter Weibel proposes, dystopian science fictions may help us clarify what we desire and do not want.

At Slanted, we are “hands on.” We love the human spark, provoke happy accidents (scratches and glitches), explore edges, and consistently enter unknown terrain. So yes, although this is a printed issue, it could very well have been transported to a neural chip. And we definitely figured out some ways to bring the issue to another dimension: A unique motif by CROSSLUCID has been printed for each cover of the entire edition—the aesthetics between portrait, still life, and expressionist topography, alien to our comprehension of what is human, natural, artificial, and digital.

More than ever this issue made us adventurers: looking with doubtful eyes at this new world of computation, numbers, and transhumanism, where (OMG!) machines are in many areas smarter than us and, occasionally, even encoded with higher ethical and moral standards than we will ever have.